


feet on the ground, head in the sky

by peggyolson



Series: naive melody [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining, Phone Calls, Slow Burn, eddie lived bitch, old men trying their best, this is a love story [ominous choral music]
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 13:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21137825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peggyolson/pseuds/peggyolson
Summary: richie and eddie put themselves back together, one long-distance phone call at a time.





	feet on the ground, head in the sky

**Author's Note:**

> this fic:
> 
> 1\. ended up becoming a richie character study! somehow!  
2\. is entirely inspired by [peggy and stan's iconic phone calls](https://jodiecomer.tumblr.com/post/119406597586) from _mad men_. also ["this must be the place"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzf4TtSYqGE) by talking heads!  
3\. can be blamed 100% on claire and mary, the banes of my existence

The easy answer is that Richie doesn’t remember when it started — the phone calls, the late nights, the sound of Eddie’s voice on the other line, tinny and sleepy and asking him not to hang up yet, Richie dismissing him with a half-hearted _ go to bed, asshole _while his pulse jumps in his neck.

Maybe, if pressed, Richie would smirk blandly, say something like, “I don’t know, a while ago,” and shrug it off with a practiced ease. Casual, that’s all it is, a normal, casual thing between friends that is so, _ so _ casual he can’t even be bothered to figure out how long they’ve been doing it.

And then, in a rare, exhausted moment of honesty, a moment that could only possibly come after a nightmare jolts him awake in the early hours of the morning, or when he’s bleary-eyed and hunched over the coffee maker, that Richie might admit he knows exactly how long they’ve been doing it, down to the week, to the day, to the hour.

But that’s not really the important part.

*

“What’re you doing now?”

“Researching when flu season starts this year. The most common misconception is that it _ always _ starts in November, which isn’t actually true, and you should really get the shot in October anyway because it’s—”

“Better in the long run to get ahead? Huh. Where have I heard that before?”

“You fucking _ asked_.” 

“Eds, you know when the people in Walgreens offer you a flu shot they’re not trying to send you to the bad place, right?” 

“It’s _ August_, it’s _ earlier than usual_, I — okay, you know what, die of the flu, see if I care.”

And that, more or less, is how it goes.

*

By virtue of being three hours behind Eddie, it makes the most sense that Richie typically calls first, especially after those few unfortunate mornings where the sound of the goddamn marimba had woken him up before sunrise.

Sometimes it’s a quick thing: a kid at a restaurant puffing away on an inhaler, a carefully arranged display of polos in a store, a Michael Jackson song on the radio. Other times he has a question — _ do you remember the name of that band I used to like? With the song that’s like, da da nuh da da nuh? You know what I’m talking about _ — or gossip he knows he couldn’t tell anyone else — _ did I ever tell you about the time I met Seinfeld? Total dick._

Mostly, though, it’s just a slight tug at the back of his mind, another part of his day. A mumbled _ let me call Eddie_, like an afterthought, while he’s tapping his foot in line at Whole Foods.

Eddie always, always answers.

“Edward Kaspbrak,” he chirps during business hours, dry and glib, and Richie will respond in a deep, exaggerated baritone with something awful like _ Mr. Kaspbrak, your test results are in and unfortunately you _ will _ keep shrinking at an alarming rate for the rest of your life_, something barely funny that he says just to get a reaction.

(It had been _ such _ a mistake to give Richie his work number.)

Eddie will drop his voice, hiss something along the lines of _ I’m at fucking work, you fucking shitbird_, because he absolutely has to take the bait, no matter what, no matter where he is or what he’s doing. He has to let Richie wind him right up even with a whole country between them, take him from zero to ten in half a second.

And Richie, with an unabashed grin, will needle: “Why are you even answering your own calls? Aren’t you important? Get an assistant. An intern. An indentured servant.”

Eddie will make a noise like he’s sighing, or even better, like he’s laughing and sighing at the same time, and come back with something like, “Believe it or not, NYU was all out of indentured servants for the fall semester.” 

“Next time try Columbia, those nepo-toddlers will do anything for a little college credit,” Richie will quip, and Eddie will move on swiftly, bored of his shit. _ What’re you up to? _ he’ll wonder, and Richie will tell him, _ Grocery shopping. Boring stuff. Criminally boring. I actually wanted to ask if you could call in a quick little bomb threat for me. _ And Eddie will scoff, so annoyed and so clear that it’s almost like he’s there in the room. _ Isn’t it like two in the afternoon there? Did you know some of us have jobs? _ So, naturally, Richie will take that opportunity to put the final nail in the coffin: _ Oh man, I didn’t know being the smallest person in the world counted as a real job, good for you making it work, buddy. _

And then the line will go dead with a definitive _ click_.

*

He came back to L.A. to a full-blown disaster.

A disaster of his own making, of course, but one he’d paid no mind to while he’d been trying to — well:

1\. Kill a demonic fucking clown.

2\. Cope with decades worth of forgotten memories.

3\. Reconnect with five people who had once meant the world to him, who he’d somehow gone without for all of his adult life.

4\. The clown was pretty fucking major. Just worth noting again.

5\. And also, Eddie.

So, yeah.

Derry had come and gone in an all-consuming flurry of emotion and terror, his time there amounting to a total of only three days, which was apparently more than enough to have the group of them blinking dumbly at each other the morning they were all supposed to go their separate ways, a collective, unspoken cloud of _ is that it? _hanging over their goodbyes.

When it came time to part with Eddie they’d lingered, murmuring expletives — 

(And Richie had made a stop at the bridge the night before, after the quarry and the necessary showers and the dinner they’d picked dazedly at — he’d almost asked Eddie to come but at the last second he’d stopped himself, gaze fixing on his wedding ring — just to see the carved initials for himself one last time, just to make sure they’d withstood the years.

They had, for the record. They’d held on, tangible proof of everything that had been taken from him.)

— until Eddie had made a frustrated sound and surged forward, wrapping his arms around Richie a little stiffly, pressing his face against his chest. Richie, his heart at a standstill, tugged him close and rested his chin on the crown of his head and allowed himself one last moment of selfishness.

It had all been a little embarrassing, honestly. And after the dramatics were said and done he’d ended up on the same flight as Bill, anyway. 

In the Uber home he checked his email with a resigned finality, smirking ruefully at the countless attempts every person on his team had made to contact him, the speculative TMZ articles that had been sent his way (_R__ichie Tozier COCAINE ADDICT… Inside His Wild Lifestyle _ was his personal favorite of the headlines because, for real, they had no fucking clue), then, of course, the inevitable ‘you are of no use to us if you aren’t making us money’ messages. Manager, agent, publicist — all gone just like that, off to devote their attention to brighter prospects. Comedians were disposable, especially the forty-year-old functioning alcoholics incapable of writing a decent joke on their own. Los Angeles turned out that specific brand of human garbage in mass quantities, and at the height of his fame Richie had simply been another on the conveyor belt. 

He’d replayed the moment in his mind so many times, always willing it to have a different ending: squinting past the lights into the crowd as a chorus of boos echoed through the theater, setting the mic down, hurrying off stage, ignoring his manager’s frenzied calls of his name. He hadn’t been in his right mind, obviously, and felt troublingly like he might puke again and couldn’t explain a thing, not even if he wanted to, so he didn’t. He’d just bailed, and that had been that.

All in all, Richie couldn’t say he blamed them for leaving.

He scrolled by the tweets, the think pieces, the video of Wendy Williams asking her audience, _ What do y’all think of… Richie Too-zee-air? _ Dropped out of the spotlight seemed to be the general consensus, but where exactly he’d dropped to no one could seem to agree. Rehab, perhaps, or a bender. Maybe he’d left the country. Maybe he was simply tired of the comedy scene. Maybe he’d wanted a fucking break.

As always, the actual story is somehow simpler and more complicated than every wild theory. Richie’s solution has been to, for the first time in his life, keep his mouth shut.

*

This is how Richie’s first five days home go:

He’d been on the road for over a month before Derry and when he comes back to his huge, ridiculous house he can’t remember where anything is. The place is cavernous and the quiet is stifling and one morning he terrifies the cleaning lady when he’s startled enough by the front door opening to rush downstairs in his underwear, wielding the first heavy item he could find (a _ Harry Potter _book, never opened) like a weapon.

He runs into a fan at, of all places, the liquor store — a white dude in his thirties wearing a Supreme shirt who assures Richie that even if he _ is _on coke, he’s still the fucking man, and can they take a picture, maybe? (Eddie laughs for exactly four minutes when Richie calls to recount it to him in unhappy detail.)

He gets his glasses fixed.

Mike sends them all a _ New York Times _ story about memory loss which he skims while waiting for the shower to heat up, screenshotting a section detailing how the daughter of a woman with Alzheimer’s uses journals to document her mother’s life. When he gets out he jots down a few fragmented thoughts on the corner of an unopened piece of mail before he feels stupid enough to shove it away in a drawer.

He deletes an email from a talent manager without reading it, and then moves it back into his inbox, and tells himself he doesn’t care at all.

He drinks. And drinks. And drinks.

Everything’s going fine.

*

No, really, it’s going fine.

“It’s going fine,” he tells Bill over lunch, which is something they do now. They eat a lot of lunch, both because it works with Bill’s schedule and because it gets Richie outside while the sun’s still up.

“Really,” Bill says, unimpressed.

“Really,” Richie reiterates, nodding vigorously. 

“So you’ve been showering regularly,” Bill says. “And you haven’t been getting takeout every night. And you’re definitely not staying up until 4 A.M. blowing what’s left of your money on a bunch of shit you don’t need off Amazon.”

Richie holds his poker face. It’s times like these he misses the stutter. “I don’t even have an Amazon account, man. Workers’ rights. Don’t you read the news?”

Bill won’t stop giving him that frown, like he knows how hard Richie’s bullshitting, which he probably does. His technique’s gotten a little rusty. “You know, Rich—” 

“Dude, seriously,” Richie says, holding up a hand to stop him before he can complete the thought, because he knows whatever Bill would say would be too… _ too_. He’d only remembered the guy had been one of his childhood best friends about eight minutes ago but somehow Bill’s affect over him remains strong and undeniable. He doesn’t know what that’s about. He reminds himself to bring it up with Eddie later.

“I’m just saying, I think there are — hey! — I think there are _ a lot of people_,” Bill says, speaking loudly enough over Richie’s fart noises of protest to attract the attention of a few people around them, “_I think there are a lot of people who would like to see you make a comeback_. That’s all. God. Like pulling teeth.”

“Your optimism is very, very sweet,” Richie deadpans. “I can’t right now, though. I’ve got a lot going on.”

“_W__hat _do you have going on?”

“Why are you saying it like that? I could have things. I _do _have things.” He pokes disinterestedly at his salad and says, before the words even really register, “I think I want to sell my house.” 

Bill’s eyebrows lift. “Oh, yeah?”

“I think so,” he says, only to realize, with a mild jolt of surprise, that it’s true, and he nods. “Yeah. That’s what I want to do.”

The house is too big, it’s too fucking _ big_, bought in a rush of pure hubris after he’d sold out Madison Square Garden the first time. It’s too much for one person, which he didn’t realize until he started spending every waking moment there, the immense emptiness of it becoming borderline unbearable. Also, the neighborhood sucks, and Dax Shepard lives on his block, and he keeps trying to convince Richie to come on his podcast every time they run into each other, usually when Richie’s just trying to grab the mail.

“Who the fuck is Dax Shepard?” comes Eddie’s incredulous question later on, when Richie’s in bed Googling things like _ how to sell a house _ and _ good realtors Los Angeles area? _

“Man, I love that you don’t know,” Richie says. “Have you ever sold a house before?”

“I live in New York,” Eddie says. There’s some indistinct rustling on his end, and Richie pictures him folding the laundry, putting away clean dishes, flipping through a book. “I’ve been renting apartments for the last eighteen years. Can’t you just use the same person you bought the house from or whatever?”

“I, uh,” Richie says, picking at a cuticle. “I wasn’t really involved in the… buying. My manager kind of, you know. Handled all that stuff.”

For a few tense heartbeats, all Richie can hear is the sound of Eddie breathing.

“By ‘all that stuff,’” Eddie says, like he’s speaking a language he’s not fluent in, “do you mean your house?”

“Yep,” Richie says.

“Oh my _ god_,” Eddie says, his voice going up at the end. “Oh my god! Do you even understand how stupid that is? You always, _ always _ need to know what you’re getting into when it comes to your health, your job, and your goddamn living situation. It’s not a fucking t-shirt, Rich! You can’t just throw it out and get a new one!”

Richie yawns, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. He sets his laptop aside and flicks off the lamp on the nightstand, cradling his phone between his shoulder and ear as he gets comfortable.

“Wait — Jesus fuck — do you even know how much you paid for it? _ Richie_!”

The next afternoon Eddie emails him a list of names and contact information, no subject line, no explanation, and when Richie calls him in confusion he goes off on a furious, rambling tangent about, again, what a fucking moron Richie is, how he shouldn’t let anyone else make decisions for him, and Eddie has a colleague who’d lived in L.A. for years so he knows the right people, and Richie doesn’t have to use any of them if he doesn’t want to, but — 

“Eds,” Richie murmurs, cutting him off. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” is Eddie’s flustered reply. He clears his throat. “I have to go, I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

“Okay,” Richie says. 

“Okay.” A pause. “Bye.” Another pause. “Call me later.”

“Okay,” Richie says again, hopelessly fond. When the line goes dead he’s grinning, and he’s glad Eddie can’t see.

*

They never text.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate — not never. Their entire iMessage history consists of short texts that are all basically some variation of _ tried to call, no answer _ or _ call you when I get home _ or _ can’t talk rn, in a meeting _ or _ can’t talk rn, watching _TheReal Housewives. That flow is only interrupted by the odd picture or video that make no sense out of context later, and these messages go largely unanswered because the response comes over the phone. Sometimes the calls are only two minutes long and sometimes they last all night, but they rarely go a day without participating in the comfort of what has now become routine. In all honesty, Richie finds he’s gotten used to hearing Eddie’s voice every day, almost like they’re kids again with zero responsibilities and all the time in the world.

He forgets how abnormal it is.

Bill, for one, can’t seem to wrap his mind around it, looking up at Richie distractedly from where he’s calculating the tip. They’d switched their lunch to dinner because Bill had been writing all afternoon, but Richie also had an incredibly productive day of seeing how many boxes of Cheez-Its he could finish before he barfed — his current record is two and a half, but he’s pretty sure he can do better.

“You just call each other every day,” Bill says.

“Well, I usually call him,” Richie says, staring down into the bottom of his glass and wondering if he could feasibly order a fourth bourbon without Bill giving him _ a look._

“Every day,” Bill repeats.

“I mean, mostly.” Richie watches Bill’s brow knit. He rubs a sweaty palm over the material of his pants. “Not like, every day. We talk a lot, but I talk to everyone a lot, you know?” He crosses his legs under the table, uncrosses them, leans back in his seat. “By the way, what have you been saying to Bev about me? She keeps sending these weird texts.”

“I haven’t said anything to anyone,” Bill says in a tone that suggests he has definitely said a lot to everyone. “Weird how?”

Richie narrows his eyes. “She told me if I ever need to _ talk _ she’s _ available_.”

“It’s called caring for your friends, jackass.”

“_Woof_, no wonder you don’t star in your own adaptations, huh? You’re a shitty fuckin’ actor.”

Bill smiles. “Does Eddie know?”

Suddenly, Richie feels like he’s underwater. He blinks a few times, rapidly. “Does Eddie know what?”

“How _ excellent _ you’re doing right now,” Bill says.

He settles, his shoulders relaxing, his breathing evening out. _ Safe, you’re safe_, he tells himself, and swallows down the panic. Then: “What are you talking about? I _ am _ doing excellent. I’m at peak excellence. This break is working out great for me, you know, it’s giving me a lot of time to think about stuff, and yesterday when I was getting coffee someone mistook me for that dude from _ The Office _ and asked me to sign their arm. So. Yeah, man. Never been better.”

Bill is literally wincing when Richie looks up at him.

“I’m gonna go,” Richie announces, his chair clattering loudly when he stands up in a hurry, clapping Bill on the shoulder on his way out.

*

The thing is, Eddie _ does _ know. 

Because Eddie was the one Richie had gone to on that first mess of a night back in L.A., caught somewhere between rage, hysteria, and acceptance. Eddie had been the one to tell him it would all be okay, managing to coax him off Twitter with a level-headed rationality.

“Listen to me,” he’d said, his voice steady in Richie’s ear. “Is there anything you can do about it right now?”

“What? Dude, my career’s over, I just puked twice in a row, and—”

“Not what I asked, fuckhead, listen to me,” Eddie said. “Is there anything you can do about it right now?”

“I don’t know, how am I supposed to know? What does that even mean?” When Eddie only hummed in response, Richie squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head as he let the question really, honestly sink in. And eventually, reluctantly: “No. There’s nothing I can do about it right now. In this shitty fucking moment. The shittiest fucking moment of my life, probably, which, as you know, is really saying something. I mean, I’ve seen your mom naked.”

“There you go,” Eddie said, ignoring the rest of it, like it really was that easy. “So, go to bed. Go to bed and figure it out later.”

“Where the hell’d you learn that, Dr. K?” Richie asked, the nickname familiar in his mouth in a way he couldn’t quite place.

“Therapy, moron,” Eddie replied, and Richie didn’t know why he was surprised: Of course Eddie would be in therapy, of course Eddie would be able to spot a problem within himself and know how to fix it, or at least how to try. It was what he’d always done best, even if he’d gone about it in the most batshit of ways. “If there’s nothing you can do about it, you might as well go to bed. Everything’ll still be fucked tomorrow, I swear.”

Richie laughed, a rough thing. He rubbed a hand down his face and nodded. “If you say so.”

So yeah, Eddie knows, but unlike Bill, he doesn’t act like a fucking freak about it. The one thing he _ isn’t _ a fucking freak about.

And, look, some days when he calls Eddie he’s too drunk to hold the phone up, and others he hasn’t so much as gotten out of bed, and even rarer are the times when he’s just gotten back from a run, dripping in sweat, muscles aching and joints creaking.

It’s not a consistent thing for him, is the point, and Eddie is nice about it. Well, Eddie is _ Eddie _ about it, which means he doesn’t really care, but it also means that he doesn’t let Richie wallow.

It’s not one huge catastrophic downswing the way he’s heard it can be for other people. It’s a… listlessness, mostly, and the unshakeable feeling that time is moving too slowly, making him acutely aware of everything he’s missing out on, of everything he should be doing.

“Does that make sense?” Richie asks, tracing his finger through the condensation on his glass. He’d finished the last of the Woodford days ago and is now making due with the cheap shit, which sucks ass.

“It makes sense,” Eddie tells him, and then he quiets, which is alright with Richie. He likes just listening to Eddie breathe, which sounds weird, but among the strongest memories he has of their youth are the ones of Eddie fumbling through his fanny pack for an inhaler, so it’s nice to know he finally trusts his lungs to work as they should. “You know, I haven’t been sleeping well since I came home.”

“No?”

“Nope,” Eddie says bitterly, like he can’t believe his body could find yet another way to betray him. “I’ve taken every sleeping pill in the book. You won’t believe how much the pharmacist at the Duane Reade on my block hates me.” 

“Oh, I’d believe it,” Richie says, not unkindly.

“And I’ve tried, you know, Xanax and Restoril, shit like that, but did you know there’s a bad kind of sleep? There’s a _ bad kind of sleep_, man.” Eddie huffs into the speaker, irked. “Benzos can put you in the bad kind of sleep.”

Richie tilts his head. “What’s the bad kind of sleep?” 

“The non-deep kind,” Eddie says. “The kind that makes you feel shitty and hungover in the morning, even if you slept eight hours. Keeps you asleep, but at what cost, you know?”

“Right,” Richie says, not fully understanding where the thread of the conversation had gone but willing to let Eddie talk as long as he wants.

“Anyway, what I’m saying is — I think everything really fucking sucks for all of us right now.”

“Not Ben and Bev,” Richie says. “Those two are beautiful and boning on the reg and they’re always on boats. They _ love _ boats now.”

“Yeah, and Bev’s also in the middle of a divorce,” Eddie says. “And her ex-husband’s a fucking prick. At least Myra’s…” He trails off into a quiet sigh. “I don’t know. Not trying to drain me of every dollar I have, I guess.”

And it takes a minute for Richie’s foggy brain to understand the correlation, to connect the words to their meaning, but when everything catches up his blood just about runs cold. He sits up so fast his drink spills in his lap, glass toppling onto the rug.

“_Shit_,” he hisses, shaking fingers attempting to use the hem of his shirt to sop up the alcohol.

“The fuck is happening?” Eddie asks, alarmed.

“I dropped a — what are you talking about? The Myra thing. Say — say more.”

“Rich,” Eddie says, slow.

“_Hey_,” Richie says, reaching down with the intention of grabbing the glass but getting distracted halfway there, his hand hanging uselessly between his knees. “Don’t do that, don’t talk to me like I’m a fucking mental patient, just — what do you mean? About Myra?”

“Dude, we split up,” Eddie says, still speaking in that slow, controlled way Richie can’t stand. “We’re — divorcing.”

“Why are you saying that,” Richie asks, barely able to hear himself over the thunder of his heart, “like I should know what you’re talking about?”

In the silence that follows, he hears Eddie start to speak a few times, and Richie sort of thinks he might go off on an unholy tirade, though he never quite gets there.

“I honestly thought you knew,” Eddie finally says.

Richie takes a deep breath through his nose. “How would I have known?”

“Because we talk every day, asshole,” Eddie says, irritation making his voice short, clipped.

Richie’s face heats as he sputters, frustrated that Eddie doesn’t seem to be grasping the gravity of the situation, which is goddamn bananas, because he is _ getting divorced _ and Richie _ had no fucking clue_. “We talk every day but you never — you never bring up shit like that!”

“‘Shit like that,’” Eddie repeats dully. “Shit like my ex-wife?”

“Don’t be all… pedantic,” Richie says, sounding humiliatingly wounded. “You didn’t tell me.”

Eddie makes an impatient sound. “You didn’t ask.”

And that’s, well. He’s in no position to argue.

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it, as if Myra’s name hadn’t almost made it to the tip of his tongue countless times in the stretch of months they’ve been going like this. And sure, yes, every time he calls Eddie at home there’s a noticeable lack of background noise, no trace of the small, natural things that come along with being in the same space as another person. And _ fine_, they fall asleep on the phone a lot, and Richie’s had some questions about that too, but sometimes it feels like Eddie exists in Richie’s life in a vacuum, a private, senseless thing he’s simultaneously protective over and scared of, and he hadn’t wanted to pull at an already delicate thread by bringing Eddie’s wife into the equation.

Ex-wife. _ Ex_-wife.

Richie’s jaw clenches. He falls back against the couch, winded. “Jesus. Eddie.” 

“It’s not going great, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Eddie says, a strained admission.

Richie blinks, his lips forming a few soundless shapes. His breath comes in short, staccato bursts that he angles away from the phone until he gets it under control. Gradually, a response comes to him: “Is it because every time you try to sign the papers she just sits on your hand for five minutes and you lose feeling in your fingers for a week?”

“Have you ever said something funny in your life?” Eddie fires back without missing a beat. “For real, honestly, have you ever successfully told a funny fucking joke?”

Richie laughs, at Eddie, at himself, at everything, throwing an arm over his face.

“Nah,” he says. “Never.”

*

“Did _ you _ know Eddie’s getting divorced?”

“Yeah,” Bill says. “Everyone knows Eddie’s getting divorced.”

“_What_?”

*

For a while, the nightmares are unbearable, vivid and severe and incomplete, like his brain’s version of a hellish highlight reel: a stark white face hiding in the shadows; a blood-red, smiling mouth hissing garbled, threatening words; a knife burying itself into the back of a skull; a closet, deep and vast. Mike, stabbed in the face. Bill, drowned in sewer water. Stan, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, decaying, screaming. Eddie, inky black bile pouring out of him. Eddie, impaled. Eddie, eyes lifeless. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.

Richie startles awake night after night, heaving and coughing, shirt soaked through, vomit rising. There’s no help for it, nothing to do besides catch his breath and change the sheets and watch TV until he nods off again. Allegedly he’d only been caught in the deadlights for a few minutes — less than five, according to everyone — but he suspects it has something to do with how fucked and scrambled his head has been.

(He’d seen it, Eddie’s triumphant face in front of him one minute and a hole through his chest the next. He’d seen it, and in the immediate dazed aftermath his only thought was _ fucking keep him safe _ so without really thinking he’d just grabbed Eddie and used every ounce of strength in his body to roll them away. Eddie’s arm had been grazed, the sleeve of his jacket tearing clean off, but he was _ alive _ and clutching Richie’s biceps and looking at him, eyes big and brave and scared all at once — classic Kaspbrak — and for a second, Richie thought — he _ thought _—)

The dreams get worse, then they get better, then they get worse again, then, bizarrely, they become more like memories — or something like them. One night, he dreams of the sun, of bony knees kneeling gingerly in the grass, of a scatter of freckles across pale cheeks, of two hands shoving playfully at his chest, of a Talking Heads song blaring from somewhere: _ You’re standing here beside me, _ David Byrne wails, _ I love the passing of time_.

He wakes up in sweaty confusion and spends an entire day out of sorts, trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not.

*

In Richie’s greatest moments of weakness and morbid curiosity he scrolls through the mountains of stand-up specials Netflix seems to be willing to hand out to any schmuck with a microphone, an acrid taste in his mouth.

He may not be a particularly good comedian but he’s sure he knows the difference between funny and shitty, so he watches a decent amount of them. The majority are forgettable garbage with only a few real stand-outs in the bunch, and it’s as infuriating as it is disappointing. He thinks about everything he’d do differently, everything he’d fix if given the opportunity. Sometimes he complains about it to Eddie, but mostly he pushes it from his mind. The emotions come in strong waves and then they taper off into nothingness, always leaving him feeling distinctly hollowed out.

It is, at least, a solid distraction from the exhaustion that goes hand-in-hand with moving.

See, last time he’d done this, he’d paid the people around him a shit load of a lot of money to handle everything from the purchasing to the selling to the packing. Richie’s only task, essentially, had been to sign his name a few times and say _ no _ or _ fuck no _ to various paint samples.

“Nobody feels bad for you,” Eddie says.

“_Somebody _has to feel bad for me,” Richie insists.

“Nobody feels bad for you,” Bill says later, without so much as a glance up from his sandwich.

“You guys fuckin’ planned that,” Richie mutters.

His realtor’s name is Kyle, an absolute parody of a person with immaculately combed hair and salmon-colored chinos. The kind of guy who orders skinny lattes and calls everyone around him _ bro_. He is also exceptionally good at his job, which really is a lucky coincidence considering Richie had chosen him using the very scientific method of calling the literal first name his eyes landed on from Eddie’s list.

Kyle sells Richie’s misery mansion and finds him exactly what he’s looking for in record time — a modestly sized three bedroom in a relatively quiet neighborhood, and he’d even come through on Richie’s most ridiculous, last minute request, one he’d really only thrown in to fuck with the guy: a place within a short drive’s distance to a dog park. 

“You know a lot of those parks have rules about letting in dogless, childless adults,” Bill says, sealing one of the last of Richie’s boxes with a strip of heavy duty tape. He’d spent twenty minutes complaining about Richie’s DVD collection — “Do you really need three copies of the first _ Matrix_?” — before sucking it up and agreeing to help.

Richie wipes at a drop of sweat rolling down his forehead. “Yeah, well, I might get a dog.”

Bill considers it. “You know what? I don’t hate that idea.”

“This is legit the first time you’ve ever said that to me,” Richie says.

He moves on a Saturday. Bill and Audra tag along to help, and because they’re well aware they’re basically Richie’s only friends in L.A. (The good news is that Richie actually likes Audra a lot, which he sort of hadn’t been expecting. She thinks he’s funny, which Richie loves, and she’s the only non-Loser he’s ever met who has a loaded arsenal of ‘Bill is a dickhead’ stories, which Richie loves even more. It also makes Bill totally insane, which Richie loves the_ most_.) They set sympathetic hands on his arms as the movers pack the last of his furniture away, and Richie doesn’t know how to tell them he feels nothing, so he just smiles and mumbles something about meeting them at the new house.

“Thanks for spending your weekend taking pity on a sad man child,” he says later, wrapping Audra in a hug. They’ve made a decent dent in the unpacking of it all, and Richie had felt grateful enough to buy them an exorbitantly priced consolation dinner before sending them on their way. “Your checks will be in the mail in five to seven business days.”

“You’re like our Make-A-Wish,” she says.

“People love it when celebrities do charity work,” Bill adds. 

He locks the door and shuffles upstairs to his new bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking around at the space. There are boxes pushed up against every available wall and the cable company isn’t coming until tomorrow and it’s not bad, it’s not bad at all, Richie just sort of thought there’d be _ more_. More… something, but he’s not sure what.

“What is this?” is the first thing Eddie says when he picks up, his panicked face filling up Richie’s screen.

“It’s called _ FaceTime_,” Richie says, over-enunciating. “It’s this newfangled invention where—”

“I know what FaceTime is,” Eddie says in a hurry. He is _ so _annoyed, the little line between his eyebrows creased, his mouth turned down like a cartoon character, eyes even wider than usual. The wound on his face has healed, Richie sees, leaving behind a thin pinkish scar just above the dimple in his cheek. The collar of his shirt is soaked through and there’s sweat dripping down his neck, like he’d been — 

“Were you _ working out_?” Richie asks, eyebrows shooting up. He tries to imagine Eddie lifting a single weight and nearly chokes on a wild, desperate laugh.

“Yes,” Eddie says defensively. “What, asshole? Why are you saying it like that? Not all of us have—” And he gestures vaguely, absently around his shoulders.

Richie grins, manic. “_What_? Not all of us have shoulders? Am I _ problematic _ for having shoulders? I learned that word on the internet.”

“Don’t talk to me, Rich, I swear to fucking god,” Eddie mutters. He disappears for a second, and when comes back there’s a towel slung over his arm and his hair is a wreck and his skin is flushed and — 

This might’ve been a bad idea.

“Okay, I’m not FaceTiming you as a personal attack,” Richie manages. He’s not squirming. He’s _ not_. “I wanted to complain about my beautiful new house and figured you might want a visual.”

“Oh, right, you moved today,” Eddie says, his demeanor changing, brow softening. It’s weird to see his reactions in real time instead of just imagining them. Richie’s brain is overactive and can fill in a lot of blanks on its own, but it can’t recreate the complexities of Eddie’s face, the way he never tries to hide what he’s feeling, even if it means vacillating between eight different expressions at once.

“I moved today,” Richie repeats. His attention catches, for a fleeting second, on the single freckle at Eddie’s hairline. 

“Did it go okay? Wait, did you say complain? Are you kidding?”

“I — alright, let me show you.” He flips the camera and takes Eddie around to every corner of the house, ignoring all the gripes he has about the way Richie has unpacked so far, and when he’s done he sits heavily at his kitchen island, giving Eddie an expectant look.

“I don’t get what the problem is,” Eddie says.

“I don’t know, man, I just assumed there’d be—” Richie cuts himself off, scratching a hand through his hair. In all honesty, he’s not sure he knows what the problem is either.

Eddie takes a moment to think about it. “You, what, wanted moving to… fix all your problems? What are you, eighteen and wide-eyed and moving to the big city?”

Richie laughs haplessly, throwing up a hand. “Yeah, so what? Maybe I have dreams bigger than my hometown, which is in, I want to say… Nebraska? Or Oklahoma. Wind, sweeping, plains, etcetera.”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t agree to have any nudes taken,” Eddie says, affectionate. Richie can tell, can see it in his eyes.

“I might get a dog,” Richie says, apropos of nothing.

“Dog won’t fix your problems either,” Eddie says with a little grin that makes Richie’s chest hurt. “Hey, why three bedrooms?”

“Oh, well, one’s a guest room for my many visitors and suitors.” Eddie nods, murmuring a half-hearted _ sure, obviously_. “And the third’s… I don’t know yet. Something. The realtor kind of talked me into it and I think I said yes just to get him to stop talking to me. He was in a frat in college, did you know that? _ I _know that because he showed me his tattoo the first time we met.”

“It’s not like I know the guy personally,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. “Third bedroom, though. Could be an office.”

“For all the important office work I do?”

Eddie hesitates, glancing away. He shakes his head. “For all the writing you should be doing.” It trips Richie up, but before he can reply Eddie is shaking his head again and adding, “It’s just a thought, man.” 

“Um,” is Richie’s input. “Okay.”

Eddie says something about finishing up, showering, getting to bed. _ Yeah_, Richie agrees, he should do the same, because _ I’m wasting a lot of valuable groaning time right now_. He demonstrates with a few guttural, unhappy whines, and he’s sure he spots the ghost of a smile on Eddie’s face just before he hangs up.

*

His memories come back in fragments, long after the Neibolt house has crumbled to the ground.

(“I kind of thought we’d be normal again,” Eddie had said once, well into the early hours of the morning, voice deep and thick with exhaustion. “Like something would snap back into place.” 

“Huh?”

“After. Y’know.”

Richie hummed. “Maybe this is just what normal is for us now.”

They each paused, letting it sink in, and huffed out laughs at the same moment.

“_Whooooa_,” they said in unison.)

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes they make sense, triggered by Bill’s laughter or Eddie’s indignation or Mike’s gentle concern when he calls to check in on Richie, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes he’s just stuck in traffic and his mind will supply him with an image of Eddie at fourteen, climbing on Richie’s shoulders, wrestling with Stan, toppling them both into the quarry when his skinny arms were overpowered.

It’s like his brain doesn’t know what to do with all the things it’s suddenly being tasked with holding so it just presents everything to Richie like a cat bringing a dead mouse to its owner: _ Is this what you want? Did I do good? Can I have a treat now? _

(The treat is the enormous blunt he smokes after a particularly strong one hits him, and the answer is always yes.)

He finds the screenshot from the_ Times _article in his Camera Roll and starts writing things down again when it gets to be too much to manage. At first they’re nothing more than incomplete scribbles on a paper towel while waiting for his bread to toast or half-sentences in his Notes app while filling up his car at the gas station. He doesn’t tell anyone about it because he doesn’t fully know what he’s doing himself, even after he starts transferring them to his laptop. It’s just a Word document full of memories — good and bad — and after weeks of sporadically collecting, he finally skims through them, his breath catching when he realizes it could be… something. He’s also more than halfway through a bottle of vodka, but that seems to matter less.

“Jesus,” he grumbles, starting when he feels his phone vibrate, discovering after a couple of seconds that the reason he feels it is because it’s trapped under his ass. He doesn’t look at the ID before answering, just shoves the thing under his ear and says, “Yeah?”

“Guess what,” comes Eddie’s voice, but that can’t be Eddie because Eddie never calls first and also shouldn’t he be at work? The sun is very much up, Richie can see it out the window, even if he hasn’t been outside yet today.

Richie squints. “Are you at work?”

“I’m — hey, asshole, you didn’t guess. No, I’m not at work, I got _ divorced _today.”

In a moment of pure déjà vu, Richie’s brain takes a few heartbeats to comprehend, scrambling and unscrambling the words, putting them in context in the order they were given to him. It’s like Eddie waits for him to start drinking to tell him shit like this.

“You’re divorced,” Richie repeats, testing it out.

“I’m divorced,” Eddie confirms, and if Richie’s not mistaken there’s a slight slur to his speech, too.

“Are you _ day drinking_?”

“It’s 6:30 here, fucknut.” He pauses. “Are _ you _day drinking?”

“I am,” Richie says, clinking his glass against the speaker. “That was me toasting you. How’s it feel?” 

Eddie grunts. “I don’t know. I’ll be paying alimony for the rest of my fucking life, but I’m keeping the apartment.”

“Well, congrats.” Richie lets out a half laugh. “Congrats? Is that right? What am I supposed to say here?”

“Don’t ask me,” Eddie says, giggling a little. Adds, “You know what she said the last time I saw her? That she didn’t recognize me. Right in front of the lawyers — ‘I don’t even know who you are anymore, Eddie.’”

Richie goes quiet, thinks about seeing Eddie for the first time in twenty-something years in that godforsaken Chinese place. _ There you are_, he’d thought nonsensically, and then: _ Oh, shit_.

“I think what she actually meant was, ‘Wow, Eddie, you _ do _have a spine.’” 

“Hey,” Richie says, shaking his head. He shuts the computer and pushes it away with his foot. “You have the biggest fuckin’ spine I’ve ever seen.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Eddie says mournfully. “You’ve never seen my spine. No, it’s… it’s okay, y’know? It’s okay.” He stops to take a breath, continues, “I asked for the divorce, did I tell you that? Like two days after I came home. I think I — look, I knew it wasn’t working before we even got married, I’m not that delusional, but then I saw all of you guys, and you — I just don’t… know how I was supposed to go back to it. Like everything was normal.” A laugh, humorless. “She had a fucking fit when I left for Derry. I had to turn my phone off.” He makes an indecipherable sound. “I guess that wasn’t cool.”

Richie’s at a loss, wanting to participate, wanting to tell Eddie — something, anything that could be reassuring, but unable to figure out what the right thing would be.

“How long were you together?” is what he arrives at, and he doesn’t fully recognize that the question has come out of him until Eddie’s replying, “Twelve years. Can you believe that? She was the first woman I — god, this is so embarrassing, but — she reminded me of my mom.”

Richie lets out a low whistle. “Yikes.”

“Fuck you, you think I don’t know? I _ know_.” Eddie releases a short breath. “It was easy, and I was alone, so I married her.”

And Richie understands that — the being alone thing. He understands it better than anything Eddie has told him so far, he thinks.

Richie licks his lips. His throat is tight. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Eddie says. He laughs again, that same rueful chuckle. “I know you hate shit like this.”

“Shit like what?” Richie’s voice sounds truly dumb, like his tongue is suddenly too large for his mouth.

“Emotional shit,” Eddie says, sounding the word out. _ E-mo-shun-ull. _

“I don’t hate emotional shit,” Richie protests, face scrunching in distaste. “I fucking love Tom Hanks movies, thank you very much.”

“Okay, Trashmouth,” Eddie says, and it bothers Richie that he doesn’t fight him on it, even if Richie is really not in the mood to fight.

“_T-Hanks _ you very much,” he adds solemnly.

“Wow.”

“I know.”

The silence that follows is companionable, uncomplicated. Richie lets his eyes shut and he pictures Eddie on his own couch, a bottle of something — maybe wine — open in front of him. His feet are up, his hair soft and loose, his shirt riding up a bit where he sits, then the image shifts and all he can see are varsity socks and abominably tiny shorts. His eyes snap open.

“For what it’s worth,” Richie says, slow and quiet, head full of fuzz, “which I know isn’t a lot coming from me — I’m glad you got out if you weren’t happy.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything. Eventually, he sighs. “Yeah. It’s for the best. I don’t know if she knows that yet, but it is.”

“That’s exactly what I said after I fucked your mom,” Richie says, heart thudding heavily. When Eddie shoots back a _ shut the _ fuck _ up, Richie _ it lacks its usual bite.

*

The ghostwriters were supposed to be a temporary solution.

_ The personality is there, your delivery is perfect_, he’d been told, _ but your material, Richie, it just isn’t working. Why don’t we_ — which was how they always phrased it, like it was a group decision, like if Richie protested in the future they’d be able to claim it had been his idea, too — _ explore other options? Just for now, just until we can get you there? _

And Richie never did find out what “there” meant, not after his star began to rise thanks to the endless stream of borrowed bits, the kind of crass shit he didn’t even think was particularly funny. There was a few years’ stretch where he was raking in more money than he would ever know what to do with, because against all reason, people — idiot people, but people all the same — were responding to the lazy jokes about his shitty personality, his dick, his nonexistent, nagging girlfriends, all the women who didn’t want to fuck him but who Richie most _ certainly _wanted to fuck. It didn’t matter what the truth was if the lie was convincing enough, and the fact that the lie required next to no effort from Richie was just a bonus. It was the same character he’d been playing all his life, the only difference being that he’d finally found a way to profit off of it.

_ I fucking knew it_, Eddie had exclaimed, and when he’d been able to fully process it after, Richie wasn’t surprised that Eddie could always see through him, even when he couldn’t remember him.

“I saw a few of your specials. I think I watched the one on… Showtime? Something like that. And like, I didn’t know you — didn’t _ think _ I knew you,” Eddie says, indulging him when Richie asks. (The special had been on HBO; Richie doesn’t correct him.) “I mean, maybe you — maybe I — whatever, but you weren’t fucking funny, that’s for sure.”

Richie laughs. A genuine, high-pitched, whole-bodied thing. “My millions of dollars would like a word.”

Eddie scoffs. “God, you should be murdered. Anyway, listening to you — it just sounded fake as shit. I didn’t believe a word of what you were saying.” When Richie presses further he insists he doesn’t have an answer, insists he could just — “Tell. Don’t ask me what it means, I seriously don’t know.”

Richie decidedly doesn’t consider the implications of that.

So.

It takes about five false starts — all of which end with him standing in his kitchen drinking whiskey directly from the bottle and/or throwing up — for him to get a complete thought out. At first it’s all unfunny, self-pitying bullshit, then it’s just a regurgitated George Carlin set, then it’s bullshit again, but it’s easy enough to get it down, easy to see the intention when he revisits it after a few days in the hopes of ripping it all apart. Comedians complain about their childhoods all the time, don’t they? That’s basically the first rule in Stand-Up Comedy for Dummies: _ When in doubt, talk shit about your parents_.

The problem is — the problem _ is_.

The _ problem _ is that if he’s ever going to do something with this material, whatever it ends up becoming, he can’t do it without — 

Which is as far as he can take it before his stomach lurches and his neck breaks out in a sweat and all the air goes out of the room. He almost trips over his own feet in his rush to the bathroom. 

He’s out of mouthwash — of course — so he shoves his mouth under the tap, brushes his teeth a couple of times, scrubbing away the taste of vomit. He splashes some water on his face and stares into the mirror, poking gingerly at the dark bags under his eyes. He needs a haircut. He needs a shave. He looks fucking old.

“You look fucking old,” he tells his reflection. It blinks back at him, exhausted. “You look bad. You look really bad. Get. Your shit. Together.” When he frowns, the lines around his mouth deepen.

“Ugh,” Richie says, with feeling.

*

What Richie quickly learns is that he really does not like writing. He has no idea how Bill’s made a living out of it when he barely has the patience to string together five minutes of jokes, because the actual act of it? Of making the time and sitting down and fucking _ thinking_? It makes him angry and it makes him tired and it inspires him to Google things like _ does the royal family have a last name _ just to escape the agony of trying to figure out a punchline to a verbose story about the time Richie, at sixteen, crashed Stan’s dad’s car while Eddie screamed bloody murder in the back seat.

There are, of course, moments of levity — 

(_Call me right now_, reads the text.

Eddie picks up on the first ring. “When I told you to stop sending Reddit conspiracy theories to my work email that wasn’t an invitation to start sending dog adoption sites to my work email.”

“But which one feels the most like _ me_?”

“Why do you think that’s something I have the time to worry about?”

“I think it would be funny, like, just visually, if I got a small one. But what would happen if I ever stepped on it?”

“You’d be doing it a favor.”

“I’ll tell you what would happen, my dog would be dead.” Richie flicks a crumb off his shirt. “So what’re you wearing?”

“_Bye, Richie_.”)

— but generally, Richie prays for the sweet release of death basically every minute.

His ego would never allow him to believe he’s strictly untalented, but even in his brightest moments Richie’s never been a very creative person. He has no marketable skills and a desperate need for attention, but he’d somehow spawned a successful career out of coasting on charm and an adequate ability to recite masturbation jokes. Now, after, there are no expectations to meet but his own, nobody to build something out of the wreckage other than himself. 

Frankly, it’s a lot of responsibility for someone who’s been eating Pop-Tarts for dinner for a week.

*

Bill’s home office is hilarious. The walls are lined with these vast bookshelves and the desk is some kind of headmaster of a prestigious British magic academy shit. There’s a huge bay window with a seat underneath, and whenever he needs a good laugh Richie imagines Bill sitting there, staring out of the glass, dreaming up his shitty endings, frowning contemplatively.

He snaps a candid of Bill across from him in his big leather chair wearing his adorable reading glasses and sends it to Eddie, then sets his phone face down on the desk. 

“I’m not a comedian, Rich,” Bill says.

Richie claps a shocked hand over his mouth. “You’re _ not_? That’s crazy, I was just saying you’ve always reminded me of a young Joan Rivers.”

Bill feigns a laugh, all sarcasm. “I just mean I don’t know if I’m the right person to trust with this.”

“Billy, I wouldn’t trust anyone else.”

Bill softens. “Hey, man—”

“Because I literally don’t have any other friends,” Richie adds.

“Get out of my office.”

Bill reads through all of it, and he does actually banish Richie to the living room one point — “The staring I can deal with, the mouth breathing is where I draw the line” — which gives Richie just enough time to think about whether he should respond to the single glasses emoji Eddie sends back (he settles on no) before Bill’s calling _ Trashmouth, get back in here. _

“It’s not bad,” is the first thing Bill says, which has Richie barking out a laugh.

“Oh, cool! So should I just walk directly into oncoming traffic or should I wait for like, a garbage truck or something that’ll definitely take me out?”

“Shut up, Richie. It’s _ good_. Coming from someone who knows nothing about stand-up comedy, it’s good,” Bill says, and he really does have his hands folded like a professor. Richie resists the urge to glance around for the nearest fire alarm to pull. “It should probably be, you know, funnier” — Richie laughs again, embarrassed beyond belief, dropping his head to his hands — “but for a first draft? It’s not bad. You’re on the right track.”

“‘It’s good!’” Richie says, segueing into his own mocking Bill impression. “‘I mean, it’s not funny and it sucks and you should probably see if you can monetize grabbing things from high shelves, but great work!’” 

“Eddie talks to you every day?” Bill says. “Willingly?”

“Only because I have decades of blackmail on him.” Richie leans forward, plucking a paperweight off the desk, rolling it around his grip. “The other day I remembered how he used to tuck his pants into his socks in the winter.” 

Bill grins in recognition. “Right, because it kept him warm.” 

“And so his pants wouldn’t drag on the ground.” Richie passes a hand over his mouth. “What a fuckin’ dweeb.” 

“I think that’s what your set is missing, by the way,” Bill says. He grabs the paperweight back and tosses it in a drawer. “Other than the jokes, you definitely need more jokes — it kind of reads like a diary entry right now — but look, you have these stories, and they’re good, they’re funny, but if the, I don’t know, joy of it isn’t there people are going to be able to tell.”

Richie pulls a face. “The _ joy _of it?”

“The joy. The personal touch. Wasn’t that your whole problem before? Nothing was authentic, you weren’t actually having fun, anyone with a brain could see right through you.” Before Richie can come back with a defense, Bill holds his hands up in surrender. “Don’t be afraid to go a little deeper, that’s all I mean.”

“Well, thanks for this, buddy,” Richie says, getting to his feet hastily. He’s uncomfortable, suddenly, and uncomfortable with the fact that Bill can tell how uncomfortable he is. “I’ll see you for office hours again next week. Can’t wait for graduation, huh?”

“Dude. Are you short-circuiting?”

“I’m great!” Richie says, voice too high, one foot out the door. 

Later, Eddie sighs at him.

“Bill told me you had a meltdown over nothing and ran out of his house.”

“I didn’t have a meltdown and I didn’t run. Tough to run anywhere when your dick’s so fuckin’ big, y’know? Ah, shit.” He wipes up the pool of whiskey that’s spilled over the rim of his glass. “Why’s Bill snitching on me, anyway? Narc.”

“I might’ve exaggerated the meltdown part,” Eddie says, a light huff to his voice. There’s sound all around him: the din of music, the low hum of conversation, a horn honking. Richie knows he must be walking — walking, specifically, around New York fucking City — but he can’t picture it clearly. Something about Eddie in New York, a place full of germs and crowds and noise, has never added up. “He said you asked him for advice, he gave you advice, and you freaked out.”

“I didn’t freak out, I don’t freak out. I’m _ fine_,” Richie says. Lets slip a single, nervous laugh. “Listen — if I can’t get this right, I’m fucked, you know? I’m not good at anything else. I don’t even know if I’m actually good at this, but.” He stops abruptly, lifting his glass shakily to his mouth, downs its contents in two gulps.

“So no back-up plan?”

“Like, I’ve thought about porn but your mom told me she just isn’t cool with me showing my body to anyone but her.”

“If that’s the kind of shit you’re writing, maybe you should find a fucking back-up,” Eddie snaps, and then, hilariously, says a genial, muffled _ thank you _ to someone. It makes Richie smile, the ease with which he — and he alone — can piss Eddie off.

“Where are you?”

“Picking up dinner,” Eddie says, and Richie’s grin falls away slowly, improbably, his mouth going slack at the thought of Eddie doing such a simple task: idly shifting the bag of food back and forth at the crosswalk, brow furrowed and mind wandering as he follows the familiar path home, nose red from the cold when he gets in the door. Then, the image slotting itself right into place as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, Richie himself on the couch, waiting, looking up with a grin when Eddie returns, like he’s never seen anything lovelier.

Holy shit. He’s a fucking lunatic.

“I’ll work on a back-up,” Richie says, blushing furiously. The quiet of his kitchen is pressing down on him, the sound of Eddie in his ear doing nothing to calm his nerves. “I’m going to go, okay? I should go. I’ll—” _Talk to you tomorrow_, he means to add, but the words won’t take shape.

Eddie starts to say something, then stops. He waits a beat. “Okay. Really? Okay. Uh, g’night? I guess.”

“It’s fully 5 P.M. here,” Richie says somberly. They hang up and Richie sinks to the floor, head falling back against the cabinets behind him. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him — or maybe he does, and that’s the whole problem.

He switches his phone browser over to private and types _ therapists Los Angeles area _ into Google, blinking at the myriad results for a total of four seconds before hastily closing out and shoving his phone in his pocket. He takes his drink to the couch and channel surfs before settling on a censored cable play of _ Punch-Drunk Love_, falling asleep to Adam Sandler telling Emily Watson, earnest as anything, _ I don’t ever want to be anywhere without you. _

*

Bev doesn’t spend a lot of time in New York anymore, but when she does she stays with Eddie. Richie knows this because they make sure to send plenty of selfies to their semi-active group chat every time they reunite, and also because once they drunk FaceTimed Richie from some bar where Bev serenaded him with the entire chorus and bridge of “Always Be My Baby” before announcing she had to “go pee” and shoving the phone back to Eddie, who only shrugged happily.

“Why don’t we ever have fun like that?” Richie asks Bill as they watch a video Eddie sends them of Bev near tears and fanning her mouth, captioned _ I told her to go for mild spice. _

“Because you’re an alcoholic and I’m busy,” Bill quips, taking a pointed sip of water.

“I’m pretty sure you used to be nicer,” Richie says, and opens his front-facing camera so he can reply with a photo of them both.

_ We seriously need to get together soon, guys_, Mike says, followed by a string of crying laughing emojis. He’s in Florida and seems goddamn content, which he deserves, but it serves as yet another reminder that, realistically, the next time they’ll all be getting together will be because one of them has kicked it.

_RICHIE_, says Bev.

_ Jesus Christ man_, says Ben.

_ im literally just speaking the truth_, Richie says, which earns him four thumbs down reactions and an eye roll emoji from Eddie.

The fact of it is that they all, for the most part, live on different sides of the country, and just because they’re basically the only people Richie wants to talk to (or is capable of talking to, honestly) doesn’t mean life is going to accommodate them. He rolls his eyes every time someone proposes a weekend and someone else replies with some variation of _ that actually doesn’t work for me because _blah blah blah insert lame-ass reason here.

It’s useless, but he’s happy to let them exhaust themselves. That’s what you do for your friends.

*

Richie runs into the booker from the Laugh Factory when he’s picking up an estimated five tons of Thai, all for himself. He freezes when he hears “Richie? Richie! Yo, Tozier!” from across the restaurant, robotically holding his hand out for a shake when he’s approached. He remembers the guy — Eric — from the nights Richie, mid-twenties, spent groveling to him after getting on stage wasted and arguing with a heckler, as well as the nights Richie, late thirties, cockily turned down his offered guest spots.

The pleasantries come and go quickly enough (_hi, how’ve you been, sorry about your very public breakdown_) and then the kicker comes: “You know, if you ever want to get back to it…” Eric trails off with a shrug of his shoulders, the unspoken promise of a favor. Richie’s food comes out at that exact moment, and he’s so grateful that he doesn’t even flinch when the teenager at the register passing him two overflowing bags gives him the slightest frown, because it’s as good of an excuse as any to escape the conversation.

“I’m serious,” Eric says when Richie tries to push past, “you should consider it. People want to know you’re alive, dude.”

He thinks, suddenly, of _ In Loving Memory of Richard Tozier _ and holds back a peal of hysterical laughter. Instead he nods, mumbles something like _ maybe, I’ll think about it, thanks, man_, and promptly throws up in the parking lot.

In the car, after fifteen to twenty minutes of nervous muttering, Richie’s made a decision, firing off an email from his phone before he can talk himself out of it.

_ Heard Chappelle might drop in tonight_, Eric writes back after confirming Richie can have a spot as early as that night, and Richie groans, tossing his phone onto the passenger seat as he pulls away.

In the end, it all goes fine.

Fifteen minutes goes by in a flash, and Chappelle doesn’t show up, and after the crowd settles from the shock of his presence it’s actually pretty anticlimactic. He leads with a clarification — 

(“Raise your hand if you thought I was super dead. Now raise your hand if you thought I was super on cocaine. Well, congratulations! You’re all wrong.”)

— and proceeds to stumble over his words a few times, clocking the uncertain laughter, like everyone’s just waiting for him to whip out a _ psych! Here’s a joke about how much my girlfriend hates me! _They don’t trust this new version of him, which is strange, and on the drive back to his house, he thinks about what it would be like to actually work for his success. Wonders what that would look like, if he’d be able to do it. 

At home, he stretches out on the couch and calls Eddie and listens to him go on about getting a new mug for the office because one of his coworkers had mistaken his for their own, and did Richie know how much shit could be passed around from something so small as sharing a mug? (The answer: “A _ fuckton_.”) He picks at a loose thread on his shirt and gets lost in the soothing familiarity of Eddie’s distaste with the world around him, zoning out on it, until:

“You’re being quiet,” Eddie says, accusatory. “Why are you being quiet? You never let me talk that long uninterrupted.”

“I’m just really focused on this mug thing,” Richie says.

“You’re annoying,” Eddie tells him.

“I—” Richie stops, braces himself. “I did a set tonight.” He decides he doesn’t want to hear what Eddie says just yet so he speaks over his response: “All new stuff. Definitely not as funny as the made up story about me diarrhea-ing at a made up gas station—” Eddie makes a noise of disgust. “—and now I’m starting to think people were only laughing because they were afraid I’d freak out again, but it’s done. It’ll get better. I hope! It might not.” 

He takes a breath, tensing.

“That’s really great, Rich,” Eddie says, and Richie doesn’t know what he’d been expecting to hear — he smiles a little, relieved. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, the attention felt great. I _ loved _the attention. I mostly just talked about you.”

Eddie squawks. “_What_?”

Richie’s face heats. “I mean, all of you guys. I talked about, you know, everyone. I reminisced. If you will.”

“I won’t,” Eddie says flatly. “What the hell did you say? You didn’t ask if you could talk about me on stage.” 

“_All _of you guys.” Richie rests a hand on his belly, swallows around the lump in his throat. “Remember the first time I got you high and you made me write up your will ‘just in case’?”

“Oh, god,” Eddie moans.

“It all came back to like, how the shit I used to enjoy hits different now that I’m forty.” And, in an attempt at consolation, “Got a pretty decent laugh.”

“Get fucked,” Eddie says, matter-of-fact. “Why aren’t you out celebrating?”

“Because Bill went to bed like three hours ago,” Richie says, only half joking. “And there’s something about drinking alone in a bar on a Wednesday night that’s just a little too on the nose for me.”

“Come on,” Eddie says, impatient. “You’re famous. You’re funny. Doesn’t everyone want to hang out with you?” 

Richie smiles thinly, trying his damndest not to read too much into the tone. “You don’t.” 

“Well, I don’t think you’re funny,” Eddie says. “And I do hang out with you. What else would you call this?” 

He sounds a bit like he’s asking something else, like he’s speaking in some code Richie should understand but doesn’t. His mouth twists. “Free therapy?” 

Eddie laughs, soft and genuine, borderline playful when he shoots back, “But how does it make you _ feel_, Mr. Tozier?” 

Richie snorts weakly. “Hey, man, I don’t feel a goddamn thing.”

“I’m glad you’re doing this,” Eddie says, a long moment later. Adds, lightly, “Fuckface.”

“Yeah, I am too,” Richie says, and thinks he might even mean it.

*

This is how Richie’s spring goes:

He keeps writing. He keeps doing sets around town. He keeps testing out material, most of which doesn’t work, but some that actually does. This is starting over, this is doing it from scratch, and he wants it badly enough to not give up on it.

He declares, dramatically, that he’s quitting drinking and lasts exactly ten hours.

He ignores the noise around him when word of his return starts to spread throughout the cesspool that is the L.A. comedy scene, the passive aggressive _ didn’t know if we’d ever see you around here again _ type comments made by people he hadn’t really been friends with in the first place.

He adopts a dog, an outrageously dumb Pomeranian mix with a major attitude problem. She’s a scruffy two-year old brat who’d been in and out of shelters her whole life, unable to find a lasting home, which Richie takes incredibly personally. His heart Grinch grows when she hops over to him the first time they meet, tongue hanging dopily out of her mouth while pissing directly on his foot. A week and a half later she’s his and he threatens to name her Eddie (“I don’t care if it’s gender neutral, you name your dog after me and I’m changing my number”) but ends up calling her Pizza instead, a placeholder that sticks after she actually starts responding to it.

He tries to exercise at least once a week, usually a “jog” around the block in the afternoon that ends with him sweaty and doubled over in pain, holding his knees and squinting against the sun. It’s easier with P, who demands at least three outdoor excursions a day and bites his fingers every time he falls asleep on the couch for too long.

He scrolls through pages and pages of unread emails until he finds the one he’s looking for, and finally responds to the talent manager who’d reached out to him months ago, right after what Richie had come to refer to as The Chicago Incident.

He makes five different consultation appointments with five different therapists, chickens out before four of them, then eventually meets with a kind-eyed woman named Lisa who says things like _let’s dig into that a little more_ and never laughs at his jokes. He gets out of his first session to find an email from Bill waiting for him in his inbox: a link to an old Onion article with the headline “Conversations Pretty Limited When Friend Not In Midst Of Crisis.”

*

He says it for the first time two weeks later, hunched over, eyes squeezed shut, hands in his hair.

It shoots out of him after Lisa asks how long he’s been single and he spins it into a joke — “The other day I heard someone in a commercial say ‘I love you’ and I yelled back at the TV, like, ‘I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment’” — which of course lands poorly, and she says, “Why is that funny?”

He erupts, and for a second he feels like he can’t breathe, and then like he might barf, and then, when Lisa simply nods encouragingly, something like relief.

“That must’ve been very difficult for you,” she says, and Richie snorts.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he says.

Her eyes flicker to the clock on the wall behind him. She crosses her legs. “I’m all ears.”

*

“_Ever use your fucking blinker, asshole? _ Sorry, what were you saying?”

“Oh, were you talking to me or the other asshole?” Richie takes pity on Pizza, who looks like she might burst a blood vessel if she’s forced to sit still for another second, and sets her bowl of food down. They’re starting to work through some basic training commands, and it turns out Richie is terrible at saying no to her, so it’s been a real group effort. 

“I shouldn’t even be on the phone right now,” Eddie mutters. “This is so dangerous.”

“Listen, it’s all good news. Well, I hope so.” Before Eddie can finish protesting — _ distracted driving is distracted driving no matter what, man _— Richie interrupts: “What’re you doing the last weekend of June?”

Eddie, sounding rattled, says, “I mean. I’ll be here. In New York. Where I live.” He clears his throat. “Why? I — why?”

“Your mom and I are finally renewing our vows, why do you think? I’m doing a show,” Richie says, valiantly ignoring the uptick of his pulse. “A real show. A full show, out here in L.A. Now, do I have a real, full show’s worth of material? We’re going to find out together, it’s all part of the fun.”

“You want me to come to your show?” is what Eddie zeros in on, and Richie’s heart stutters. Anxiety forms like a rapidly expanding ball in the pit of his stomach. He starts to reply but before he can, Eddie’s shouting, “_What the fuck are you doing, dickhead? What the _ fuck _ are you doing? It’s a green light! Do you have functioning fucking eyes_?” 

“I can’t believe you drive in Manhattan,” Richie says, pressing a cool hand to his cheek in effort to melt away his blush. He kneels down to greet P, fresh off breakfast, and accept the tennis ball she drops at his feet. He throws it, watching her skitter across the kitchen tile.

“I think it’s good for me,” Eddie says. “So. A show? Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s in a pretty small theater and I don’t know if anyone’s even going to buy tickets and, again, how am I going to fill an hour?” Richie says, aware he’s rambling but unable to stop his mouth from moving. “It might not work at all, I’m just trying it out. My manager thinks it’s a good idea. You don’t even have to come, I just thought—”

“I’ll make it work,” Eddie cuts in. “I — yeah, I’ll come. Of course.”

Suddenly, Richie feels very, very warm. “Okay. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. You can, uh. You can stay with me, if you want.” Pizza whines, nudging her saliva-drenched ball toward him urgently. “You can finally meet P. She says hi.”

“You named the goddamn dog Pizza,” Eddie says, newly exasperated every time he’s reminded of it. “Listen, I don’t — I can get a hotel, I mean—”

“Oh — yeah, no, if that’s what you—” 

“Like, totally up to—”

“No, like, it’s not a big — but if you—”

“_Yeah, take your fucking time, cumrag! No one has anywhere to be!_”

Richie nearly chokes on the force of his own laugh. “I’m sorry, _ cumrag_?”

“I can get a hotel,” Eddie says, bristled.

Richie sucks his bottom lip into his mouth. Pizza, bored of waiting for him to play with her, goes to gnaw serenely at the leg of a chair that had cost more than some cars. “Stay with me,” he says, face burning. “I’m the one making you come out here and everything. I have the space.”

“Well,” Eddie says, like he’s gearing up for another argument. “Okay.” Then, “I’m not picking up dog shit.”

“Wait, you’re supposed to _ pick up _the dog shit?”

“Of _ course _ you’re supposed to pick up the dog shit,” Eddie snaps.

Richie bites back a grin. “It’s biodegradable. I’m helping the planet, Eds!”

He texts the group chat with a rude, borderline indecipherable invitation — _nobody move, I think Trashmouth’s attempting sincerity_, Bill says — and everyone agrees to make it work, regardless of what has to be moved around.

Some time later, after Richie babbles good-naturedly about how Ben, excited as he is, had only been able to wait all of ten minutes before sending his flight confirmation, Eddie says, voice dull, “I didn’t — that’s cool everyone else can come too,” and Richie can only frown, confused, and agree, “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

*

The night before Eddie gets to L.A., he shows up in Richie’s dream. 

It feels oddly like a memory, but cloudier, surrounded by the ethereal border of something his brain would invent. He’s in a bed that’s not his own, in a dark room that’s blurred around the edges, though it registers as vaguely familiar: He’s been here before, he thinks, just as he presses his phone to his ear, and then there’s Eddie’s voice, hoarse and low as it murmurs _ hey, Rich_.

“You know what’s weird about killing a demon space clown,” Richie hears himself saying, “is that it’s kind of hard to sleep after.” 

“Funny you say that, I can hear Ben snoring like a gorilla through the wall,” Eddie says. 

Richie smiles. “Poor Bev.”

“Poor Bev,” Eddie says, distracted. “I showered three times and I feel like I still can’t — there was all this… blood and shit under my nails. I think I caught something from that water, I fucking told you guys. It’s probably like, radioactive.”

“It’s not radio — wait, shit, should I be worried about these spider legs growing out of my head? Stan ended up okay, right?” 

Eddie groans deeply. “_Dude_. Jesus _ fucking _ Christ.” 

“So we’re not ready to joke about this yet, gotcha,” Richie says. He glances around the room, looking for a clock he knows must be close but can’t seem to locate. “Sorry, Stan.”

Eddie snorts. “Stan would’ve hated knowing we talked about him on the phone in the middle of the night at all.”

“On the phone in the middle of the night down the hall from each other,” Richie adds, to which Eddie asserts, “Sorry, Stan.” He pauses for a moment that feels like an eternity. “I need to try to sleep.”

“Sure,” Richie says.

“Stay on the phone,” Eddie tells him, firm. 

“Sure,” Richie says, knowing he’d do just about anything Eddie asked of him, even in this bizarre dream world. 

Then Eddie says something improbable: “I think I really missed you, Richie.”

It can’t be right, Richie’s sure this actually happened but he couldn’t have said that, could he? Before he can question the reality, the scene dissolves into something sunnier, something younger, and there’s Eddie at fourteen, maybe fifteen, lying next to him in the grass. This is familiar too, but now it feels like he’s looking in from the outside, watching himself say something indistinct that makes Eddie laugh so hard their knees knock together. He leans in to inspect the comic book Eddie’s reading but when he looks it’s just all a blur of shapes and colors. The only noise he can make out is that same Talking Heads song playing somewhere, distant and muffled: _ The less we say about it the better, make it up as we go along_.

*

The airline loses one of Eddie’s suitcases — 

(“What do you even _ have _ in another bag? You’re here for two nights and it looks like you dumped your whole apartment into this one.”

“I have _ stuff_, shithead, I like to be prepared when I travel.”

“Prepared for the… apocalypse?” 

“Prepared for _ anything_, what’s so fucking crazy about that?”

“Like, a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff is fucking crazy about that.”) 

— which keeps them occupied for a good forty-five minutes before Richie drags Eddie away from the harangued LAX employee, steering him to the car with an arm slung around his tense shoulders. Eddie spends the drive fucking restlessly with the radio, dissatisfied with all of Richie’s preset stations, heaving a put-upon sigh when Richie makes him stop on an old, synth-y LCD Soundsystem track. They don’t say much, but it’s fine, Richie reasons — a six hour flight is exhausting, and they already talk enough for ten people — as he steadfastly ignores the thump of his heart.

Pizza takes an immediate liking to Eddie, scratching her little nails against his leg until he relentingly lifts her into his arms, managing to keep his grimacing to a minimum when she licks his face. Richie watches the whole display with a sort of manic desperation, and is thankful for the distraction provided by Eddie’s vehement unhappiness with Richie’s house.

“Half your shit is still in boxes,” Eddie says halfway through the tour, staring at the bedroom in horror. He looks a little surprised when he says it, like he wasn’t expecting to say anything, and seems to cradle P a little closer. “Fucking _ — _ how do you _ find _anything?”

Richie shrugs. He hasn’t thought very much about it, figuring he’d get around to fully unpacking eventually. Over the past few months he’s taken to pulling things out at random and placing them around the house as he sees fit. He’d meant to at least hide the chaos before Eddie’s arrival.

“I mean, everything’s labeled.” He nudges his foot against a box, marked in black Sharpie with a big _ B_. “The ‘B’ is for bedroom. Or maybe it’s for bathroom, I get them confused all the time.”

“Squatters live better than this,” Eddie says, exchanging a judgmental frown with the dog.

“Squatters _ wish _ they lived like this,” Richie says. “Look at this crown molding. Eh?”

“Tell me what you think crown molding is,” Eddie says.

Richie considers it. “Squatters _ wish _ they lived like this.”

Eddie doesn’t take the bait, just keeps frowning and shakes his head a fraction. It keeps Richie on edge long after they leave the room.

*

To the surprise of no one, Eddie is an incredibly high maintenance traveler. The enormous suitcase currently sitting in Richie’s guest room is proof of that, but a few weeks earlier he’d answered the phone in the middle of a neurotic spiral, rambling on about flight times and prices and his company’s vacation policy, and yes, he knew Bev and Ben and Mike would be flying in the day of Richie’s show but, actually, it would really be _ way _ fucking easier for Eddie to arrive a day early because flights were cheaper on Fridays, and — 

“Dude,” Richie said. “Come whenever you want, I don’t give a shit.”

Eddie made a sound like he’d been expecting Richie to fight him on it. “Okay, fine. You better pick me up from the airport, I’m not dealing with the fucking Uber situation at LAX.”

“Okay, fine,” Richie echoed, grinning a hopeless sort of grin. 

And now Eddie is here, in Richie’s house, petting his dog and scowling at his bare walls and making a big show of “accidentally” stumbling into the boxes lining his hallway. It’s all sort of surreal.

The fact is that it’s been a long fucking time since Derry, just a handful of weeks shy of a year on the dot. Almost a year since Richie had last seen Eddie in person, since he’d last heard his voice without the aid of an iPhone speaker. He’d hoped — stupidly — that with time this thirty year old thing would start to fade, that with the renewed perspective his memories gave him he’d be able to get over something for the first time in his dumb life. That he’d finally be able to look at Eddie and get it through his head how off-limits he was and fucking move on.

As it happens, Richie is still incapable of changing.

None of them are, really, especially Eddie, who still folds his arms over his chest the same way he used to, brow furrowed and mouth pinched, a barbed comment perpetually on the tip of his tongue. The lines around his eyes have deepened and Richie’s spotted a few grays in his dark hair, but he’s still so fundamentally _ Eddie _ in all the ways that have made Richie ache since before he even understood what it meant to ache for another person.

Jesus.

_ Anyway_.

Richie grabs P’s leash off the hook next to the door and presents it to Eddie with a deep bow.

“For you, good sir,” he says, sliding into his stuffiest Hugh Grant impression. “It’s time for the lady’s afternoon stroll.”

Eddie’s lips thin. He says, a little strained, “Don’t you dare do the British guy right now.”

While P trots in front of them with her smug little nose in the air — delighted to have the attention of someone besides Richie for once — he shows Eddie the neighborhood landmarks: _ I almost barfed in this driveway a while back, that’s Jon Hamm’s house, there’s P’s favorite shitting spot — yeah, right next to the mailbox, isn’t she cute? _ Eddie takes it all in with his usual mix of curiosity and outrage, and Richie chooses to think nothing of how uncharacteristically reserved he sounds with his vague _ hm_s of acknowledgement, how he’s gradually gotten quieter as the day has gone on. Once, when P decides to inspect the tire of a car parked on the curb, she tugs a little too hard on the leash and jerks Eddie’s arm forward. The movement makes their shoulders brush and it’s like something sparks to life at the contact, but Eddie angles away before Richie can wonder if he felt it, too.

They go out for dinner — sushi, and Eddie is sure to give the disinterested waitress his laundry list of dietary restrictions — and then head back to Richie’s. They watch TV (an HBO encore of _ The Lost Boys_, the only option Eddie musters enthusiasm for) while Pizza chills blissfully between them. All the while, Richie keeps talking, his motormouth spouting off words at a nearly incomprehensible speed, desperate attempt after desperate attempt to get Eddie to fucking do something, _ anything_, like throwing pasta at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.

It feels — off. It all feels _ off_, and yet — 

Well. Richie wishes he could stop looking at him, is all, but he _ can’t_, even as they sit on the couch and try to act as normally as goddamn possible around each other. He looks and he looks and it’s so easy to think of them at thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, to see all of Eddie’s former selves layered over this current version, to feel just as heartsick and starry-eyed as he did back then.

Three decades, he thinks, is a long time to love someone and not get tired of loving them.

“I’m gonna go to bed,” Eddie announces, climbing to his feet. Pizza, unhappy her cool new friend is leaving, licks his hand in protest.

“Okay,” Richie exhales. In an absolutely inexplicable, belated move, he stands too. “You know where everything is.”

“I know where everything is,” Eddie echoes. He reaches out to wipe the dog drool off on Richie’s shirt. “In boxes.”

“Yeah, and don’t move any of ‘em,” Richie says, only kind of aware of the words leaving his mouth. He glances at the freckle at Eddie’s hairline, as if to make sure it’s still there. “It’s a delicate system, like Tetris. One thing moves, the whole tower comes down.”

Eddie’s nose wrinkles. “You mean Jenga.”

“Right, that’s what I said.”

“Are you staying down here?” Off Richie’s nod, Eddie nods back. He shoves his hands in his pockets, takes them out again. “Well. Night, Rich. Thanks for having me.”

“The pleasure is all Princess Pizza’s,” Richie says. “For real. She does _ not _like me as much as she likes you.”

One corner of Eddie’s mouth turns up and something inside Richie thrills at the sight. He grabs, stupid and clumsy, for Eddie’s thin wrist, circling his fingers around it loosely. The sweaty heat of his palm is scalding against the chill of Eddie’s skin.

Eddie looks a bit like a deer caught in the headlights when he tips his head down and stares at their hands, fixated, flushing. They stay like that for a while, until Eddie pulls away with a gentleness Richie didn’t know he was capable of.

“Bed,” he says, like he’s reminding them both, and looks at Richie only once over his shoulder as he heads for the stairs. “You should get a rug or something for in here, man.”

Richie laughs roughly, listening to Eddie’s footsteps as he heads upstairs, to the click of a door behind him.

“Jesus,” Richie mutters, sounding raw.

*

In the morning, Richie finds Eddie already awake and fully dressed, head buried in the fridge as he speaks to Pizza: “There’s no goddamn water. What does he let you drink?”

“Mostly just beer,” Richie says, just to watch Eddie jump — then, inevitably, frown because he’d let Richie startle him. “That’s safe for dogs, right?”

“Tell me you aren’t drinking the fucking contaminated California tap water,” Eddie grouses, slamming the fridge door shut. “They make water filters for a reason, moron.”

“P, baby, he thinks I drink water,” Richie says, grinning down at Pizza. She responds with a bark that he assumes is supposed to mean _ I don’t care, feed me_. “Yo, did you know the government’s poisoning the water supply? That’s real, dude, and it’s happening.”

“What have I told you about Reddit?”

“Interesting coming from the guy who has his homepage set to WebMD.”

“All you have in your fridge is expired yogurt and three bottles of chipotle hot sauce,” Eddie says. “Same brand. All half-full.”

“Don’t throw those out, they last forever,” Richie says.

They order breakfast burritos out of necessity and eat them in Richie’s overpriced backyard lounge chairs while Pizza does laps in the grass. He sneaks a glance at Eddie, the early morning sun casting shadows on the angled planes of his face, and pushes his food aside.

If Eddie has any thoughts about the night before he doesn’t voice them, doesn’t say much of anything, so they sit in near-silence that Richie pretends is companionable until Eddie stands with a tight, rushed explanation: “I have some work to do. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

He lingers outside for a while, hoping Eddie will come back, will talk his ear off about something he doesn’t care about, like the difference between the air here and the air in New York, or all the dust he’s found in Richie’s bathroom. This doesn’t happen, and so Richie trudges up to his office to pretend to read emails and pore, for the umpteenth time, over his set.

Well, his _ sets_. There are two currently sitting in separate documents on his computer — one, tried and true and tested in front of several semi-unwilling audiences over a period of months, and the second, largely the same aside from one minor detail. Maybe not minor.

He’s choosing to blame its existence on his therapist who had said, encouragingly, “Write it down if you feel like you can. Just to see what it would be like,” after Richie had essentially vomited up his insides all over her pristine office. He hasn’t shown anyone, and he’s sure he’ll never perform it, except for the little part of him that isn’t sure at all — the same part, he suspects, that pushes him to do things like hold on to Eddie’s wrist when the guy’s just trying to go to bed.

“I feel like I’m losing my mind,” Richie says. From where she’s sprawled out on his feet under the desk, Pizza looks up, tilting her head indifferently.

In the late afternoon, the Losers group chat begins to blow up:

_ WE MADE IT_, says Ben.

_ John Mayer was on our flight_, says Bev. _ Richie I wanted to invite him to your show but he slept the whole time!!! _

_ The woman next to me snored for four hours straight_, says Mike. _ Four. Hours_.

They plan to meet at a much too trendy Italian place; naturally Richie spends so long trying to flatten one side of his hair that he makes himself and Eddie late. Eddie, who has been ready for an hour by the time Richie decides he’s good to go, bitches about it the entire ride.

Their eventual arrival receives a thrilled, if not mostly sarcastic, round of clapping that Richie accepts with his arms outstretched and a booming cry of _ I love my fans! _ Tight hugs are exchanged, his tropical shirt is lightly mocked, and for the first time in months, all’s right with the world. It feels so good to be with these people, such a relief, that he orders himself a whiskey and doesn’t think about the way Eddie moves away to situate himself between Bev and Bill at the table.

“By the way, we tried to pry Bill for details on your set but he didn’t give an inch,” Bev says in the middle of a conversation about the venue Richie would be performing at.

“I haven’t even seen it since its early, _ early _stages,” Bill says, holding his hands up in surrender. “He doesn’t let me come to his shows.”

“Yeah, because I’m not looking to get heckled by someone I _ know_,” Richie says, sipping his drink. “That’s what strangers are for.”

Mike nudges his arm affably. “It has to feel good, right?”

“It doesn’t feel like anything yet,” Richie lies, feigning nonchalance.

“Bullshit,” Eddie pipes up, eyes boring into Richie’s. “I heard you rehearsing in the mirror earlier.” Then, addressing the group: “He laughs at his own jokes.”

“I should sue you for slander, Kaspbrak,” Richie says. Below his collar, his skin heats, the weight of Eddie’s gaze just about crossing the line into _ too much_. “I let you into my home, I feed you my food—”

“You don’t have any food.”

“I allow you to drink my coffee—”

“I bought the coffee, you were out.”

“I give you a bed to sleep in—”

“Which I had to put sheets on myself.”

“I let you play with my dog—”

“_She _ plays with _ me._” 

“She sure does,” Richie affirms, reluctant. “That one actually hurts. Betrayed, by my own spawn and my own—” He cuts himself off abruptly, pausing for just a beat too long. “—Eddie.”

“Aw,” Ben says, a happy look on his face. Eddie’s mouth twists.

They eat mountains of pasta and Richie continues drinking until Eddie reaches over to snatch his glass away with a muttered _ you’re not getting on stage drunk again, dipshit_. His mouth feels dry through the whole meal, his hands sweaty, his mind occupied with Eddie, who is sitting far away but not quite so far that Richie’s able to miss the way their legs occasionally brush under the table, his heart leaping pathetically into his throat with every movement. He tunes in and out of the conversation (Bill, talking about the book he’s in the process of adapting into a miniseries; Bev, about her new solo women’s line), taken aback by how easily Eddie carries on, bickering back and forth with Richie like they hadn’t spent the day in separate rooms, avoiding each other. It strikes him how ironic it is that it took actually, physically being in the same place for them to learn to shut the fuck up. 

Everyone, though, is in such good spirits that Richie can’t stand to ruin it, even when Mike catches his eye, a questioning smile on his face. Richie waves off the concern with a shrug and a flippant _ just nerves, you know_, turning away before he can figure out if Mike actually believes it. The restaurant is bumping some ‘80s playlist over the speakers, an absurdly appropriate choice that has them all giggling each time they’re reminded of how _ bad _ most of the music they once loved is. It turns out Richie _ does _ still know all the words to the Beastie Boys’ “Hey Ladies” —

(“Wait, no, what did you used to sing instead, Rich?” Ben asks, pleasantly tipsy and leaning into Bev. “You wrote new lyrics, what was it—”

“_Hey, Eddieeeee_,” Bill says, doing his best impression of Richie’s pre-pubescent pitch, laughing and looking to Eddie beside him, who confirms the memory with a resigned shake of his head. “Yeah, it was like — _ hey, Eddieeeeee, get funky_!”

“Well, Eddie has historically always loved getting funky,” Richie manages, chest tight with embarrassment.)

— and that Mike’s awful Freddie Mercury voice is still the funniest shit he’s ever heard. At one point a familiar island-esque track comes on and it takes a second to place it over the noise in the room, the noise at their table, but at the first line — _ home is where I want to be _— Richie’s eyes are snapping up. Eddie’s already staring back, looking slightly pale, lips parted.

_ I feel numb, born with a weak heart. I guess I must be having fun. _

Richie excuses himself to the bathroom, a little drunk and out of sorts as he ambles down the hallway where, thankfully, he can only hear the music if he strains. He takes off his glasses, braces his hands on either side of the sink, splashes water on his face, tries to make sense of the dizzying thrum rattling his bones. He breathes, focusing on it the way his therapist taught him to in moments like these. In, out. In, out. In —

“You okay?”

Out. 

He looks up. Eddie’s standing near the door with his hand still on the knob, like he expects Richie to make a run for it. He looks exceptionally good, which is unfair: hair neatly combed, shirt pressed with a few buttons undone at the collar, slim-fitting pants. He is a fucking J.Crew ad and Richie is seconds from vomiting in a restaurant that offers “a plate of olives” as a twenty-five dollar entree.

Eddie is also, if Richie’s not mistaken, if the fluorescents aren’t deceiving him, blushing. That registers, and then he realizes what he’s doing, eyes lifting from where they’re roaming over Eddie’s body.

“I’m okay,” Richie says. “Just taking a second to bask in this moment before I become wildly famous again. I’m totally going to pretend I don’t know you.”

“Pretend all you want but your mom’ll never forget me, asshole.” Eddie’s gaze flickers: from Richie to the wall behind him, back to Richie, back to the wall. “Are you nervous?”

“Like, generally? Oh god, _ yes_. Maybe clinically.”

Eddie groans. “Jesus Chr — about the _ show_.”

“Oh,” Richie says, blinking. It hasn’t occurred to him to be nervous yet, consumed as he’s been by — well. “Uh. Ish. But not in like, a stage fright-y way. I think I…” He trails off. Runs his tongue over his teeth. Watches the bob of Eddie’s Adam’s apple. “I think I’m afraid of getting up there and everything, I don’t know. Everything being exactly the same.”

“Didn’t that make you a millionaire?” Eddie places his hands on his hips, unenthused. “You just have to stand on a stage, say whatever you want, then you get to go home to your dog. That’s it. I never understand what celebrities are always complaining about.”

It startles a harsh laugh out of Richie. He says, “That’s coming from you, pal. You were always the brave one.”

“Fuck off,” Eddie says, eyes narrowing irritably, and Richie realizes he must think it’s a joke, a way of making fun of him, but before he can clarify Eddie adds, “Why are we still in here? It smells like shit, let’s go. You’re paying for dinner.”

“Wait, I — Eddie,” Richie says, at a loss. That name, an anchor. He doesn’t have a follow up.

“Just—” Evidently Eddie has no follow up either, because his mouth snaps shut. All Richie can hear is the rush of blood in his own ears.

Staring at Eddie feels like being caught between two selves, two worlds — one older but not any wiser, the other happier but just as uncertain, both vibrant and underlined by fear. Both, of course, have Eddie, because no version of this, no version of Richie, exists without Eddie — even all those years he couldn’t remember him, because he wasn’t really existing, anyway.

Eddie, sharp-tongued and loud-mouthed and astoundingly caring in his own way. Eddie, able to stop Richie’s heart just by looking in his direction. Eddie, who he’d strangle if given the opportunity, and vice versa. Eddie, who he’d probably die for, without hyperbole or hesitation. Eddie, his best friend.

Eddie, right there in front of him, looking just as fraught as Richie feels, an ocean between them.

“Stop,” Eddie finally says, quiet. “I’ll see you out there.” He turns to leave, and then, over his shoulder: “Wash your fucking hands, you animal.”

And, surprisingly enough, all it takes is the sight of Eddie’s retreating back for Richie to make a decision. It might be, he thinks, the easiest one he’s ever made.

*

He says it for the second time on stage, mic clutched in his hand, sweat cooling on the small of his back.

There’s no other outcome, he thinks, blinking against the harsh spotlight, no other way this night can go, and whatever happens — it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to matter.

“Hello, hi,” Richie says, grinning and waving genially. The cheering goes from polite and welcoming to borderline out of control when someone — who, Richie suspects, sounds a little like Ben — whoops and starts it all over again. His heart clenches. He breathes. He nods. “Thank you. Hi. Thanks for coming. Hello. I’m gay, how are you? Is everybody having fun? I’m gay.” He nods his chin at a woman in the front row. “How are ya? Hi.”

The room goes quiet and so does Richie, listening for the few uncertain laughs that trickle through the audience as everyone tries to figure out what, exactly, is happening. If they’re allowed to laugh, if it’s even funny at all, if Richie’s about to say _ got you, motherfuckers! You should’ve seen your fucking faces! _ And maybe for a few seconds he thinks about it, about what it would be like to take it back, how simple it would be. Fear pricks at every inch of his skin and surges at the back of his mind, his body’s age-old way of reminding him of all there is to be afraid of, and for the first time in his life Richie finds he’s exhausted enough to push it away. 

From there, it’s clockwork: The hour passes with stories of growing up in Maine (“Which is just as homophobic as the south but with none of the personality”), stories about the Losers (“Not to brag but they’ve all threatened legal action if I keep talking about them in my act”), and a final open question (“Does coming out mean all the super sexist shit I’ve said over the years is now forgiven? Like, automatically null and void? Just something to think about on your drive home tonight”). He sets the microphone down and lets the applause carry him off stage, smiling apologetically at his manager, who’s staring at Richie in open-mouthed shock.

“I know, right?” Richie grins, a little crazed, a little nauseous. He heads toward his dressing room, one foot in front of the other. Steady, steady, steady. “Go ahead and let my friends back when they come by, will you? Thanks! Sorry!”

*

He doesn’t puke, which feels something like progress. Instead:

“That was incredible,” Bev tells him for the fourth time, reaching up to cup his face in her hands. “Hey. Look at me, kid. I’m so proud of you.”

“Public self-discovery is the easiest way to get a Netflix deal and I really want an Emmy, so.” Richie laughs when she punches his arm, bundling her up in another hug and holding on tight. “In all seriousness, thank you guys for coming to see my monthly pilgrimage from my house. Sorry for the surprise but I had to make it worth it somehow.”

“Like we ever would’ve missed it,” Mike says, face open and honest.

“Just for the record, just so everyone knows,” Bill says, eyeing Richie with something he thinks might, humiliatingly, be pride. “I did _ not _know he was going to say that.”

“Yeah, well, I needed the confusion to feel real or else we _ never _would’ve fooled ‘em,” Richie says, a sentiment that is met with a chorus of boos. He looks to Eddie, curiously silent after his initial, mumbled congratulations, standing near the door with his hands in his pockets. Richie’s vision swims. He adjusts his glasses. “Eds, what’s the verdict? Did you laugh at all?” 

Eddie pulls a face like he’d been hoping Richie wouldn’t address him, then he shrugs. “Fuck no,” he says, chin jutting out in that achingly familiar way of his. “I’m not handing out pity laughs.”

Richie grins, his heart turning over. He wants to blast off the earth. He wants to sink into the floor. 

He declines a post-show celebration (“Rich, it’s your literal coming out party! You’re our resident debutante!”) as well as his manager’s multiple requests for meetings, and he doesn’t know how to process Ben’s whispered, “He was laughing the whole show. Don’t tell him I told you,” as they part with a promise to meet up for lunch before everyone leaves tomorrow.

There’s a car waiting to take Richie home idling outside the venue that he almost doesn’t realize Eddie’s followed him to until they’re seated beside each other in the back.

Richie tilts his head. “You should go out with those guys, if you want. Don’t let me stop you.”

“I can’t believe you’re not,” Eddie says mildly. His fingers are fanned out on his thighs and Richie clocks, for the first time, the absence of a wedding ring.

“I mean, P’s definitely super pissed she hasn’t been fed yet so I have to start winning back her affection like, now,” Richie says, mouth twitching with an anxious smile. “She’s not just gonna let you leave, you know. We might have a stowaway sitch on our hands.”

Eddie grins, seemingly despite himself. “If she does it’ll be an act of protest against the name you fucking saddled her with.”

They laugh together and something warm, sort of youthful, curls between them. Eddie will fly home tomorrow and Richie will keep doing shows in L.A. and he will continue to come out, over and over again, every night, and he doesn’t know where that leaves the two of them. Maybe nowhere. Maybe this just isn’t what adults are meant to have with each other, friendships as intense as ones from childhood can be. Maybe the phone calls, and whatever they were getting out of them, were just a means to an end. Maybe that’s all there is, and maybe Richie has to accept it.

Richie’s grin falters before sliding off his face altogether. He turns away to stare out the window instead, watching the lights go by in bright, blurry bursts all the way home.

*

_ Richie Tozier Reportedly Comes Out As Gay _

_ Comedian Richie Tozier Just Made a HUGE Revelation and We’re Literally Crying _

_ Wait, Is This Richie Tozier Thing Real?_

_ On Richie Tozier, Coming Out and Our Threshold for Forgiveness _

“Jesus fuck,” Richie mutters, hastily deleting the Google alert. Pizza, curled up at his side, lifts her head. “Don’t look at me like that, of course I have a Google alert of my own name. This is the most action it’s gotten in like, a year, give me a break.”

He’d insisted on no cameras so naturally several people had recorded the set. A shakily shot iPhone video of him saying the words _ Hello, I’m gay_, and the muted reactions that followed is rapidly racking up retweets and making the rounds across entertainment sites; his manager has already sent him five separate messages about potential interviews and “next steps,” whatever that means.

_ Buddy_, he wants to say, _ my next steps involve my dog, my bed, and this bottle of bourbon. _ In his fantasy, he’d attach a photo of himself holding up the aforementioned bottle of bourbon. In reality, he just ignores the emails.

This is the part no one talks about, the immediate aftermath: the widespread scrutiny over his longest held secret, the unbridled urge to _ run _ until he reminds himself, again, that it had all been his choice. Still, Richie knows regret really fucking well, could easily identify the signs of it from miles away, and he hasn’t caught himself feeling the hot, shameful coil of it yet, so he’s almost positive he’s on the right track.

After a while he puts the computer away and turns off the lights, stroking P’s head as he stares blankly ahead at some reality show playing on the TV, the fast-moving images bathing the room in swaths of red, blue, yellow. His breath is just about under control when his phone vibrates on the nightstand, a jarring, intrusive sound that makes him jump. He reads the name flashing across the screen three times before answering.

“Did somebody break in?” Richie whispers, by way of greeting.

“What?” Eddie’s indignant, which is how Richie likes him best. “No one fucking broke in. But if someone did want to rob you, you’ve made it _ insanely easy _ by already having your shit packed up for them.”

“The thought of a confused burglar getting one look at my house and going, ‘Did he fuckin’ _ want _ to be robbed?’ is funnier than like, anything I said on stage tonight,” Richie says, smiling at the laugh Eddie lets out, at the familiar sound of it filtered through the speaker.

“By the way, this guest room you stuck me in seriously looks like it belonged to someone who died three months ago,” Eddie says.

“That’s insulting to dead people,” Richie says.

“I can’t believe you’ve just been living like this,” Eddie says, incensed. He’s probably shaking his head. He _ loves _to shake his head. “Why? Who lives like this?”

Richie snorts. “I’m going to work on it, okay? I’m working on a lot of things, if you can’t tell. I’ve been busy.”

Eddie makes a noise like he doesn’t believe it. And then, to Richie’s surprise, “You were pretty good tonight.”

“Wait, sound a little more like you have a gun pointed at your head right now, you’re not really selling it.”

“Okay, fuck you, forget it, you were awful.”

“_Thank you_, Eds,” Richie says, grinning. He pauses, watching his fingers disappear into a tuft of Pizza’s fur. “I should’ve told you guys before. I just — I think that was the way I had to do it, if it was ever going to happen.”

“As dramatically as humanly fucking possible,” Eddie says. “Right.”

“Right,” Richie repeats. His heart is pounding, pulse racing. He thinks of _ R + E _ and squeezes his eyes shut. There is, quite honestly, nothing left to lose. “It took a long time.” A beat. “I mean, do you see how fucking old I am? I’m old as shit.”

Eddie swallows audibly. “Yeah, you have to start moisturizing or something, dude.”

Richie’s brow furrows. “Do _ you _moisturize?”

“Of course I moisturize,” Eddie says, offended. “Who doesn’t moisturize? I guess people who use cardboard boxes as closets.”

Richie laughs, wholehearted and powerless and so, so fond. Something swells in his chest, something indescribable but palpable and real. He is a wreck, his heart is a wasteland, his mind is a disaster zone: _ Danger! Do not cross the yellow tape! _

“Holy shit,” Richie says, breathless, the words tumbling out of him without his control, “I love you.”

There’s a long silence on the other line. Eventually, “What?”

“I’m in love with you,” Richie blurts. His hand falls away from P and into his lap, curling into the sheets.

This time, Eddie’s response is quicker: “You’re _ what_?”

“_I. Love. You_.” Richie huffs, exasperated. Of course he had to go and fall in love with the most annoying idiot nerd on the entire— “Everything you do makes me nuts. Everything you’ve _ always done _ has made me fucking nuts.”

“_Me_? Do you even — you are the fucking _ worst_,” Eddie fires back. “You’ve always been the _ fucking worst_.” 

“I _ know_,” Richie says. His armpits are sweating, he notices vaguely. “And now you have your shit together and I’m still a mess, and—”

“You think I have my shit together?” Eddie makes a sound, an incredulous exhale. “I just got divorced, I hate my job, I still carry a fucking inhaler around with me even though I know it’s — and I — god, you have no idea, Rich.”

The words settle over him, and maybe Richie’s had it wrong the whole time. Maybe, whenever he relied on their calls for comfort, for help, Eddie was relying on them too, in his own way, for his own reasons. There’s a glimmer of hope somewhere in all of this, but Richie doesn’t want to let himself acknowledge it.

“But your shit isn’t in boxes,” is the first response Richie can think to come back with. “That’s just a me thing.”

He imagines Eddie, in Richie’s weird, creepy guest room, rolling his eyes. “That’s just a you thing.”

“Totally,” Richie says. “I love you.”

“_Fuck_.”

Richie breathes, shaky. He presses a hand to his heart just to feel it, to be sure this is actually happening. A hazy memory comes to him, the image of a different, smaller Eddie on his mother’s porch, wrapped in Richie’s arms, Richie’s face buried in Eddie’s hair, saying goodbye.

“You love me,” Eddie says, like he’s searching for a loophole.

“I love you,” Richie insists, easy as anything.

“That’s insane,” Eddie says.

“Yep,” Richie says.

“You’re like my brother.”

Richie scoffs. “You don’t _ have _a brother.”

Eddie quiets at that. “I — I mean, I don’t — _ Richie_.”

“I know, I have the worst timing,” Richie says, apologetic. “It’s—”

“Shut up for a second, I swear to god, just stop _ talking_,” Eddie says, and Richie listens, the way he always listens to Eddie. “Me too. Okay? I — me too. Obviously, me too.”

For a second, Richie swears his heart stops. There’s no coming back from this, but why would he want to? He wishes, wildly, that Eddie were there, wishes —

Oh, wait.

Richie throws the phone into the mess of sheets without bothering to hang it up, clambering to his feet and disturbing Pizza in the process, who gives him what could easily be classified as the most displeased look of all time. In his haste, the blanket gets twisted around his legs, tripping him up, and he almost falls straight on his face, leaving a trail of discarded linens behind him as he stumbles down the hall. Without thinking, without knocking, he shoulders the door to the guest room open with so much force it slams back against the wall.

“_Holy shit_,” Eddie yelps, his own phone flying from his hand. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, hair loose, wearing boxers and an oversized, holey bootleg Bart Simpson shirt — _shut up and get the h*## out of my way, you idiot_, it reads.

“Is that my shirt?” Richie asks, breathing heavily.

Eddie looks down at himself, and in the dim lighting spilling in from the hall, Richie can just about make out the flush coloring his face. “The bag they lost was the one with my pajamas in it, okay?” He adds, aggrieved, “I grabbed this out of a box in your hallway.”

“It looks good on you,” Richie says, smiling, helpless and in love.

“It’s huge,” Eddie mutters. He tugs at one of the sleeves, which hangs down past his elbow.

“Like I said, it looks good on you.” Feverish, Richie sinks down on the mattress, barely able to control himself enough to leave a few inches of space between them. “So. You were saying.”

“Yeah,” Eddie breathes. “Me too.” He thrusts a hand out jerkily, fumbling until his fingers thread with Richie’s. They lock eyes and Richie feels warm all over: _ There you are_, he thinks. There he is: Eddie Kaspbrak, brave and determined and terrified and all Richie wants in the world.

Richie swallows. “This isn’t like a, ‘Hey, I’m gay, let me just try to fuck the first guy I see’ thing. Just so you know. I like, actually for real love you.”

Eddie’s eyes widen, his free hand cutting violently through the air. “Why would you _ even _say that, asshole? Why would you put that in my head? God, just so you know, you’re fucking bad at this. Zero out of ten. I’ve seen more sincerity in brick walls.”

“You want sincerity? I can do sincerity,” Richie says, stroking a reverent thumb over Eddie’s knuckles before untangling their fingers. He releases a breath that becomes a disbelieving laugh, bringing his hands up to rest tentatively on either side of Eddie’s face. He rubs slowly over the thin scar on Eddie’s cheek, then leans in to seal his mouth over it.

Eddie gasps, a sound Richie would do basically anything to hear over and over again, and one of his hands lands in the center of Richie’s chest, almost absently. Outside, the cicadas buzz and chirp, cars drive by, sirens shriek in the distance. The world spins on, unaware of the standstill Richie’s has come to.

“Okay,” Eddie murmurs, nudging his nose against Richie’s cheekbone.

“Okay,” Richie says, always one step behind him, and meets Eddie’s eyes for just a second before kissing him soundly: Two stars colliding, two magnets finally meeting.

It feels brand new and very much like something they’ve been doing this whole time. Richie has no choice but to give himself over to it, into the feeling of it turning from tentative and searching to frantic and sloppy in a few heartbeats. He goes with it and pulls Eddie into him, seeking out skin as he shoves his hands gracelessly under the hem of his shirt, spreading out over his back, fingering the knobs of his spine. They make out like teenagers — which Richie supposes they sort of are — and it’s a total disaster of wet sounds, stubble scraping, and teeth clacking. Eddie fists a hand into the front of Richie’s shirt while the other twists in his hair, and Richie lets out a straight up humiliating whimper, fully at Eddie’s mercy. 

They part to catch their breath but Richie quickly busies himself with trailing kisses along the sharp line of Eddie’s jaw. Eddie’s chest heaves, his thumb coming to rest in the hollow of Richie’s cheek, such a small, sweet gesture that makes Richie feel like he’s burning up from the inside.

If this is it, what a way to fucking go.

“Don’t leave tomorrow,” Richie says, pulling feebly at Eddie’s — at _ his _ — shirt, simultaneously in the biggest rush of his life and wanting to savor every second.

“Worst timing _ ever_,” Eddie mutters, leaning in until their foreheads rest together. He’s relentless with his movements, touching Richie everywhere: rubbing over his shoulders, his chest, his hips. He’s trembling but still frowning in concentration, the crease between his brows slotting into place. He is a fucking dream, and Richie loves him. Richie loves him so much he could burst wide open with it.

“I suck,” Richie says as he hauls Eddie closer, right into his lap, head clouded over with affection and pure, honest-to-god want. He winds an arm around Eddie’s waist, sinks his teeth into the arc of his neck just because it’s right there in front of him, before tilting his face up. His stomach flips when Eddie takes the hint and meets him halfway, pushing their lips together again, suppressing a groan against Richie’s mouth. If he notices that Richie’s already half hard — popping a boner over some kissing at his age, who the fuck is he? — he’s nice enough not to mention it.

“You _ suck_,” Eddie says, then seems to think better of it and laughs. He fixes Richie’s glasses, which Richie hadn’t even noticed were crooked. “I suck, too.”

“I hear that’s a good thing when it’s two dudes, though,” Richie says, holding his hand up for a high five.

Eddie blinks. Without a word, he climbs off Richie’s lap and leaves the room.

“Very funny, very cute, _you_ should be a comedian,” Richie calls after him, and waits for the _sike!_ that doesn’t come. “You’re a _monster_, Kaspbrak. This is what we in the biz call ‘taking the bit too far.’”

He gets to his feet and heads toward his own room where he finds Eddie crouched beside the pile of sheets Richie had left in his wake, rubbing P’s ears.

“She shit in your bed,” Eddie says conversationally.

“That tracks,” Richie says. “Wanna go for a W-A-L-K?”

Pizza, perfect genius that she is, decodes the secret message and scurries down the hall, barking like a maniac.

*

Eddie holds the leash again while Richie mostly tags along for moral support and also to make eyes at his dog walker. Around them, the neighborhood is quiet and calm, their shoes on the pavement mingled with P’s light panting providing a soothing soundtrack.

“Stop staring at me,” Eddie says, the beginnings of a smile twitching at his lips.

“You’re allowed to stare at someone when you love them, those are the rules,” Richie argues, snagging Eddie’s hand.

Eddie’s lips purse, betraying the way he squeezes Richie’s fingers. “Did you learn that in Stalking 101?”

Richie beams. “You’re my Jodie Foster, Eds.”

“Gross,” Eddie says, wholly loving. Pizza halts them so she can inspect a tree and decide whether it’s as worthy of her fecal matter as Richie’s very expensive mattress. “We’re not kidding ourselves, right?”

Richie, who’d been admiring the way their hands fit together like a complete fucking moron, looks up with a raised eyebrow. Eddie meets his gaze, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip.

“Do _ you _think we’re kidding ourselves?”

“No,” Eddie says, honest. “But I’m also, you know. Too close to it to be objective.”

With a glance at P, who is still sniffing the dirt cautiously, Richie steps forward and gathers Eddie into his arms. For once, Eddie goes easily.

“We don’t have to figure everything out tonight,” Richie says. He smooths his hands over Eddie’s narrow hips, nosing at the single freckle dotting his hairline. “I’m crazy about you and it rules. That can be it for right now.”

Eddie sighs a pleased sigh, face dropping down to hide itself against the bend where Richie’s neck meets his shoulder. When he speaks, it’s a warm whisper against fabric: “You’re crazy about me. That’s a nightmare.”

“A nightmare,” Richie agrees, overwhelmed.

They walk on for a bit longer, letting P tire herself out. It’s late, Richie’s not sure what time exactly, but what does it matter to him, anyway? Their joined hands swing idly between them, shoulders bumping, talking about nothing important. It’s unreasonable how simple it all is, so simple that Richie is sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop: another fucking clown, or the ghost of Sonia Kaspbrak, or maybe just waking up to find out it had all been a particularly involved dream.

Then again — Eddie’s real. He’s sure of it. He’s positive.

They come up on the cul de sac at the end of Richie’s block and he starts to turn around when Eddie stops him with a yank on his arm. He shushes him when Richie starts to speak, nodding at the house they’ve paused in front of.

The place is sizable but not obnoxious, probably the home of someone like Richie — a been there, done that type. All the lights are on, the windows thrown open, shapes of bodies casting languid shadows on the curtains, a party clearly in the process of winding down. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be looking at and opens his mouth to prod Eddie for details when he hears it, soft and unmistakable as it drifts out of the house.

_I can't tell one from the other_, David Byrne croons. _I find you, or you find me?_

“You remember, right?” Eddie murmurs.

Richie responds by dropping his hand so he can tug him in, draping an arm over his shoulders. Like he’s operating on instinct, Eddie’s arms loop around his middle. At their feet, Pizza paws at a twig, deciding whether it can be trusted.

“They’re gonna call the cops or something,” Eddie adds.

“We’ll go in a minute,” Richie says. “It’s just a really good song.”

“It is,” Eddie says.

Richie grins, lowering his head to rest on top of Eddie’s. He closes his eyes and listens, listens, listens.

**Author's Note:**

> :')
> 
> find my corny ass @ [suzybishops](https://suzybishops.tumblr.com/) on tumblr dot gov


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